Aeneid

Virgil

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

  1. Soon as the funeral pyre was builded high
  2. in a sequestered garden, Iooming huge
  3. with boughs of pine and faggots of cleft oak,
  4. the queen herself enwreathed it with sad flowers
  5. and boughs of mournful shade; and crowning all
  6. she laid on nuptial bed the robes and sword
  7. by him abandoned; and stretched out thereon
  8. a mock Aeneas;—but her doom she knew.
  9. Altars were there; and with loose locks unbound
  10. the priestess with a voice of thunder called
  11. three hundred gods, Hell, Chaos, the three shapes
  12. of triple Hecate, the faces three
  13. of virgin Dian. She aspersed a stream
  14. from dark Avernus drawn, she said; soft herbs
  15. were cut by moonlight with a blade of bronze,
  16. oozing black poison-sap; and she had plucked
  17. that philter from the forehead of new foal
  18. before its dam devours. Dido herself,
  19. sprinkling the salt meal, at the altar stands;
  20. one foot unsandalled, and with cincture free,
  21. on all the gods and fate-instructed stars,
  22. foreseeing death, she calls. But if there be
  23. some just and not oblivious power on high,
  24. who heeds when lovers plight unequal vow,
  25. to that god first her supplications rise.