Poetry

By Matthew Arnold.

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Alaric at Rome

Admire, exult, despise, laugh, weep, for here
There is such matter for all feeling.

I

Unwelcome shroud of the forgotten dead,
Oblivion’s dreary fountain, where art thou:
Why speed’st thou not thy deathlike wave to shed
O’er humbled pride, and self-reproaching woe:
Or time’s stern hand, why blots it not away
The saddening tale that tells of sorrow and decay?

II

There are, whose glory passeth not away—
Even in the grave their fragrance cannot fade:
Others there are as deathless full as they,
Who for themselves a monument have made
By their own crimes—a lesson to all eyes—
Of wonder to the fool—of warning to the wise.

III

Yes, there are stories registered on high,
Yes, there are stains time’s fingers cannot blot,
Deeds that shall live when they who did them, die;
Things that may cease, but never be forgot:
Yet some there are, their very lives would give
To be remembered thus, and yet they cannot live.

IV

But thou, imperial City! that hast stood
In greatness once, in sackcloth now and tears,
A mighty name, for evil or for good,
Even in the loneness of thy widowed years:
Thou that hast gazed, as the world hurried by,
Upon its headlong course with sad prophetic eye.

V

Is thine the laurel-crown that greatness wreathes
Round the wan temples of the hallowed dead—
Is it the blighting taint dishonour breathes
In fires undying o’er the guilty head,
Or the brief splendour of that meteor light
That for a moment gleams, and all again is night?

VI

Fain would we deem that thou hast risen so high
Thy dazzling light an eagle’s gaze should tire;
No meteor brightness to be seen and die,
No passing pageant, born but to expire,
But full and deathless as the deep dark hue
Of ocean’s sleeping face, or heaven’s unbroken blue.

VII

Yet stains there are to blot thy brightest page,
And wither half the laurels on thy tomb;
A glorious manhood, yet a dim old age,
And years of crime, and nothingness, and gloom:
And then that mightiest crash, that giant fall,
Ambition’s boldest dream might sober and appal.

VIII

Thou wondrous chaos, where together dwell
Present and past, the living and the dead,
Thou shattered mass, whose glorious ruins tell
The vanisht might of that discrownèd head:
Where all we see, or do, or hear, or say,
Seems strangely echoed back by tones of yesterday:

IX

Thou solemn grave, where every step we tread
Treads on the slumbering dust of other years;
The while there sleeps within thy precincts dread
What once had human passions, hopes, and fears;
And memory’s gushing tide swells deep and full
And makes thy very ruin fresh and beautiful.

X