The Philosopher's Lament - 2
[Continued from Part 1]
“And the efforts of the Senate to extinguish all this fury
Were frustrated by convictions that their god would promptly hurry
To reward and praise the burning of the books in Caesar’s hall:
Pliny, Tacitus and Thallus, and to rescue from the Fall—”
“Man, who, to their minds, with weakness and with infamy is covered,
And who cannot live in honor unless by this faith recovered.
Who are they to claim such knowledge, to proclaim us in the dark,
When their theory of Nature is that all came from an Ark?!”
“Odes to Bacchus might be pointless if the gods did not exist,
But by what right do they reckon that we too are lost in mist?
As to man, by what concoction fabricated in the East
Do they claim the noblest creature to be little more than beast?”
“Where, in man, they see a squalid, unrequited, dismal creature,
I see beauty and much noble to admire in every feature.
They see tragedy and error, unrestraint, reasons for shame;
I see Venus and Apollo, Hercules and nothing lame.”
“They maintain that their religion by their Providence emerged,
That by Christus their dominion over the Empire has surged,
When I know—as well as any who our history has seen—
That by cunning, fraud and scheming all our power wrought has been.”
“And when I, of all the people in the Senate, singly durst
Ridicule their machinations and attack, and be the first
To tell Caesar in plain language before all the Roman world
That our handsome Roman eagle was as good as dead and cold—”
“If our homeland and our temples were prostrated before fools,
I was met with shouts of anger and then banished from the schools
Of great learning—where for decades I had been among the teachers—
By a hoard of angry peasants, of archbishops and of preachers.”
“With feigned meekness and forgiveness or with pity condescending,
I was exiled here on Patmos, where perchance I might find mending
For my sins through deep reflection and by holy intermission
Of their saints: those sordid creatures who had lost their full cognition,”
“And, especially, above them, by that man with wicked lips
Who in caves upon this island had composed th’ Apocalypse.
But no matter... It is written: ‘One weak man against the age
Is a galley in the tempest, a faint scribble on a page.’ ”
[Continued in Part 3]
Find my poems and published poetry volumes at www.eton-langford.com
Copyright © Eton Langford | Year Posted 2016
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