dots-menu
×

Home  »  The English Poets  »  Sonnets: On the Late Massacre in Piedmont

Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. II. The Seventeenth Century: Ben Jonson to Dryden

John Milton (1608–1674)

Sonnets: On the Late Massacre in Piedmont

AVENGE, O Lord, thy slaughter’d saints, whose bones

Lie scatter’d on the Alpine mountains cold;

Ev’n them who kept thy truth so pure of old,

When all our fathers worshipt stocks and stones,

Forget not: in thy book record their groans

Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold

Slain by the bloody Piedmontese that roll’d

Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans

The vales redoubl’d to the hills, and they

To heaven. Their martyr’d blood and ashes sow

O’er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway

The triple tyrant; that from these may grow

A hundred fold, who, having learnt thy way,

Early may fly the Babylonian woe.