Greek wayfarers, and other poems

Chapter 54: THE GODS ARE NOT GONE, BUT MAN IS BLIND

Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

About This Book

A lyrical collection evokes ancient and modern Greece through mythic retellings, ritual scenes, and landscape vignettes. Poems range from dramatic addresses to figures of legend to intimate portraits of contemporary Easter processions, seafaring rites, funerary stelæ, and rural labor, using vivid sensory detail of temples, hills, and the sea. Themes of memory, reverence, loss, and cultural continuity recur as the poet moves between narrative lyric, ekphrastic responses to antiquities, and pastoral sketches. The result is a varied formal palette that intertwines classical allusion with observations of everyday life and seasonal celebration.

THE GODS ARE NOT GONE, BUT MAN IS BLIND

Over the hills the gods come walking,

Where the black pines draw their swords,

And the spell-bound leaves cease talking,

For the High-Priest sun comes stalking

And ’tis no time for words.

And oh! the gifts the gods are bringing—

Stretches of happy heath,

Jewels with souls, and flowers singing;

Smiling stars, and new hope springing

With the wingèd hope called Death!

Over the hills the pipes are playing,

And the gods come strong and fair.

Alas! they know not of the straying,

The faithlessness and bitter saying:

“We know no gods, nor care....”

Over the hills—the day-sky kindles

On a blackened world of clods;

Dead and dry are the flaxless spindles,

The cruse is drained,—the fire dwindles ...

No worshipers for the gods!