Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
Greece and Turkey in Europe: Vol. XIX. 1876–79.
Last Days of Byron
By Charlotte Fiske Bates (1838–1916)J
Of facing death in fronting Moslem steel,
Lo! in the fever’s silent strife he sank!
Out of the valorous yet chaotic Greeks
His skill and nerve had gathered ordered ranks.
May not the chaos of his passions first
Have heard “light” summoned, and have felt its dawn?
May not the liberty of God’s own truth
Have struck some shackles of his bondage off
While he was seeking to make others free?
Amid the blackness we must see and shun
Gleams out a light wherein is read the hint
Of the surpassing glory sin eclipsed.
Who knows what age or illness might have wrought;
Those two reformers of an evil life,
That have of vilest sinners moulded saints?
Be it not ours to cover vice of his,
But to remember we have seen his worst,
Which most men hide as niggards do their hoard.
All her nerves tremble with bewildered joy:
Round some creations such a splendor burns,
He seems himself the very lyric god,
Encircling whom great passions of the soul
With linkéd hands, like maids of Helicon,
Accord his power in faultless harmonies.
Greece lives forever in his splendid verse,
Which, should her relics utter ruins lie,
Could bound her glory with immortal lines.
Fitting that he who loved and sang of her
Should breathe his life out on her lovely shore!
Wave-beaten Missolonghi, it is thou
That hold’st the parting secrets of that soul
Not walled, like thee, with strength, but like thyself
Beaten forever by the mighty sea!