Odes 2.13 (Gladstone): Ille Et Nefasto

On evil day thou planted wast,
And reared, O tree! by impious hand,
And, to the planter's children's cost,
For scandal of the village planned.

Just such a man the neck had broke
Of his own sire, and shed the blood
Of his own guest by nightly stroke,
And skilled in Colchian poisons stood,

And damned arts and jugglings all:
He planted thee on my estate,
Thee, trunk accursed, thee, doomed to fall
Athwart thy luckless owner's pate.

From day to day what risks to shun
Who knows? The Punic seamen dread
The Bosporus; but reck of none
That other seas about them spread.

Rome fears the flying Parthian's plan,
Parthia the Roman's prison-chain;
But Death's unlooked-for stroke o'er man
Hath triumph gained, and yet will gain.

Proserpine's kingdom wrapped in gloom,
The blessed in their distant ring,
King Aeacus delivering doom,
And Sappho, with Aeolian string,

That chides her girls, I nearly saw:
Alcaeus too, with golden quill,
That did his mournful picture draw;
Ship's, war's, and exile's endless ill.

The Shades drank in each poet's word
In silence meet for sacred strain,
But dearer to the common herd
Are tales of war and tyrants slain.

Not strange. The hundred-headed hound
'Dropped his dark ears to songs like those,
And, in the hair of Furies wound,
Snakes had a moment of repose.

Sound can Prometheus, and the sire
Of Pelops, from their pains beguile,
Orion too of hunting tire,
While lynx and lion rest the while.