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Home  »  The Standard Book of Jewish Verse  »  At Samaria

Joseph Friedlander, comp. The Standard Book of Jewish Verse. 1917.

By Clinton Scollard

At Samaria

WE climbed the hill where from Samaria’s crown

In marble majesty once looked away

Toward Hermon, white beneath the Syrian day;

And lo, no vestige of the old renown.

Save a long colonnade bescarred and brown,

Remained to tell of Herod’s regal sway,

The gold, the gauds, the imperial display,

He heaped on Judah’s erewhile princely town.

Ruin was riotous; decay was king;

An olive-root engript the topmost stone;

As tho it clutched and crusht the thing called fame;

Seemed as a fragile wind-flower petal blown

Into the void, the past’s vain glorying,

And Herod but the shadow of a name!