Page:Homer - Iliad, translation Pope, 1909.djvu/374

372 The purple death comes floating o'er his eyes.

Then brave Deucalion died: the dart was flung

Where the knit nerves the pliant elbow strung:

He dropped his arm, an unassisting weight,

And stood all impotent expecting fate:

Full on his neck the falling faulchion sped,

From his broad shoulders hewed his crested head:

Forth from the bone the spinal marrow flies,

And sunk in dust the corpse extended lies.

Rhigmus, whose race from fruitful Thracia came,

The son of Pireus, an illustrious name,

Succeeds to fate: the spear his belly rends;

Prone from his car the thundering chief descends;

The squire who saw expiring on the ground

His prostrate master, reined the steeds around.

His back scarce turned, the Pelian javelin gored,

And stretched the servant o'er his dying lord.

As when a flame the winding valley fills,

And runs on crackling shrubs between the hills;

Then o'er the stubble up the mountain flies,

Fires the high woods, and blazes to the skies,

This way and that the spreading torrent roars;

So sweeps the hero through the wasted shores:

Around him wide immense destruction pours,

And earth is deluged with the sanguine showers.

As with autumnal harvests covered o'er,

And thick bestrown, lies Ceres' sacred floor,

When round and round, with never-wearied pain,

The trampling steers beat out the unnumbered grain:

So the fierce coursers, as the chariot rolls,

Tread down whole ranks, and crush out heroes' souls.

Dashed from their hoofs, while o'er the dead they fly,

Black, bloody drops the smoking chariot dye:

The spiky wheels through heaps of carnage tore;

And thick the groaning axles dropped with gore.

High o'er the scene of death Achilles stood,

All grim with dust, all horrible in blood:

Yet still insatiate, still with rage on flame;

Such is the lust of never-dying fame!