Page:Homer - Iliad, translation Pope, 1909.djvu/348

346 Behind them, piping on their reeds, they go,

Nor fear an ambush, nor suspect a foe.

In arms the glittering squadron rising round,

Rush sudden; hills of slaughter heap the ground;

Whole flocks and herds lie bleeding on the plains,

And, all amidst them, dead, the shepherd swains:

The bellowing oxen the besiegers hear;

They rise, take horse, approach, and meet the war;

They fight, they fall, beside the silver flood;

The waving silver seemed to blush with blood.

There tumult, there contention, stood confessed;

One reared a dagger at a captive's breast,

One held a living foe, that freshly bled

With new-made wounds; another dragged a dead;

Now here, now there, the carcasses they tore:

Fate stalked amidst them, grim with human gore.

And the whole war came out, and met the eye;

And each bold figure seemed to live, or die.

A field deep furrowed next the god designed,

The third time laboured by the sweating hind;

The shining shares full many ploughmen guide,

And turn their crooked yokes on every side.

Still as at either end they wheel around,

The master meets them with his goblet crowned;

The hearty draught rewards, renews their toil;

Then back the turning ploughshares cleave the soil:

Behind, the rising earth in ridges rolled,

And sable looked, though formed of molten gold.

Another field rose high with waving grain;

With bended sickles stand the reaper-train.

Here stretched in ranks the levelled swarths are found,

Sheaves, heaped on sheaves, here thicken up the ground.

With sweeping stroke the mowers strew the lands;

The gatherers follow, and collect in bands;

And last the children, in whose arms are borne,

Too short to gripe them, the brown sheaves of corn.

The rustic monarch of the field descries,

With silent glee, the heaps around him rise.

A ready banquet on the turf is laid,

Beneath an ample oak's expanded shade;

The victim ox the sturdy youth prepare;

The reapers' due repast, the women's care.

Next ripe, in yellow gold, a vineyard shines,

Bent with the ponderous harvest of its vines;

A deeper dye the dangling clusters shew,

And, curled on silver props, in order glow:

A darker metal mixed, intrenched the place;

And pales of glittering tin the enclosure grace.