Salvete amici...
I have a bit of cut-and-paste that definitely belongs in the Artium, but doesn't seem to fit any of the existing topics. Perhaps the closest is "Ithaca"; mine's poetry too, of a modern kind, but it's not that one...and must every poem get its own thread?
So..."Modern Poets on Rome"; as opposed to "Roman Poetry", which would be the ancient variety, I'm thinkin'. I have several other samples of such material, by Kipling, Benet and others; enough to justify a seperate topic. And if anyone else has some such work they'd like to share, why, now you've got somewhere to put 'em!
Here's the first, a hard day in Roman Britain; "Uricon" in the poem is Viroconium:
On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble,
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves.
'Twould blow like this through holt and hangar
When Uricon the City stood;
'Tis the old wind in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood.
Then, 'twas before my time, the Roman
At yonder heaving hill would stare:
The blood that warms an English yeoman,
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.
There, like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
It blows so hard, 'twill soon begone:
To-day the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon.
---A.E. Houseman, _A Shropshire Lad_
"...one day we shall be the past, and our griefs will lie where lie those of the Romans of old... Do we not therefore care to learn something of those who have handed down the torch through the ages--as we should wish that generations yet unborn should care to learn something of us?"
--J.M. Durant, _Journey into Roman Britain_
In fide,