Aeneid

Virgil

Vergil. The Aeneid of Virgil. Williams, Theodore, C, translator. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910.

  1. Aeneas straightway from his lofty ships
  2. lets down his troop by bridges. Some await
  3. the ebbing of slack seas, and boldly leap
  4. into the shallows; others ply the oar.
  5. Tarchon a beach discovers, where the sands
  6. sing not, nor waves with broken murmur fall,
  7. but full and silent swells the gentle sea.
  8. Steering in haste that way, he called his crews:
  9. “Now bend to your stout oars, my chosen brave.
  10. Lift each ship forward, till her beak shall cleave
  11. yon hostile shore; and let her keel's full weight
  12. the furrow drive. I care not if we break
  13. our ship's side in so sure an anchorage,
  14. if once we land.” While Tarchon urged them thus,
  15. the crews bent all together to their blades
  16. and sped their foaming barks to Latium's plain,
  17. till each beak gripped the sand and every keel
  18. lay on dry land unscathed:—all save thine own,
  19. O Tarchon! dashed upon a sand-bar, she!
  20. Long poised upon the cruel ridge she hung,
  21. tilted this way or that and beat the waves,
  22. then split, and emptied forth upon the tide
  23. her warriors; and now the drifting wreck
  24. of shattered oars and thwarts entangles them,
  25. or ebb of swirling waters sucks them down.