Arthur Quiller-Couch, comp. The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse. 1922.
A Roman MirrorSir James Rennell Rodd (18581941)
T
There where the numberless dead cities sleep,
They found it lying where the spade struck deep
A broken mirror by a maiden dead:
Alternate blue and amber all untied,
A lamp to light her way, and on one side
The toll men pay to that strange ferry-boat.
Only the record of long years grown green
Upon the mirror’s lustreless dead sheen,
Grown dim at last, when all else wither’d there.
One picture of that immemorial land;
For oft as I have held thee in my hand
The dull bronze brightens, and I dream to see
And o’er one marble shoulder all the while
Strange lips that whisper till her own lips smile,
And all the mirror laughs about her eyes.
Might smooth the windy ripples of her hair
And knot their tangled waywardness, or ere
She stood before the Queen Persephone.
She holds a shadowy mirror to her eyes,
And looks upon the changelessness and sighs
And sets the dead-land-lilies in her breast.