Aeneas At Washington

I myself saw furious with blood

Neoptolemus, at his side the black Atridae,

Hecuba and the hundred daughters, Priam

Cut down, his filth drenching the holy fires.

In that extremity I bore me well,

A true gentleman, valorous in arms,

Distinterested and honourable. Then fled

That was a time when civilization

Run by the few fell to the many, and

Crashed to the shout of men, the clang of arms:

Cold victualing I seized, I hoisted up

The old man my father upon my back,

In the smoke made by sea for a new world

Saving little—a mind imperishable

If time is, a love of past things tenuous

As the hesitation of receding love.

(To the reduction of uncitied littorals

We brought chiefly the vigor of prophecy,

Our hunger breeding calculation

And fixed triumphs)

I saw the thirsty dove

IN the glowing fields of Troy, hemp ripening

And tawny corn, the thickening Blue Grass

All lying rich forever in the green sun.

I see all things apart, the towers that men

Contrive I too contrived long, long ago.

Now I demand little. The singular passion

Abides its object and consumes desire

In the circling shadow of its appetite.

There was a time when the young eyes were slow,

Their flame steady beyond the firstling fire,

I stood in the rain, far from home at nightfall

By the Potomac, the great Dome lit the water,

The city my blood had built I knew no more

While the screech-owl whistled his new delight

Consecutively dark.

Stuck in the wet mire

Four thousand leagues from the ninth buried city

I thought of Troy, what we had built her for.