Alexander Pope: Selected Poetry and Prose

(Tina Meador) #1

With well-taught feet: now shape in oblique ways,
Confusedly regular, the moving maze:
Now forth at once, too swift for sight, they spring,
And undistinguished blend the flying ring: 210
So whirls a wheel, in giddy circle tossed,
And, rapid as it runs, the single spokes are lost.
The gazing multitudes admire around:
Two active tumblers in the centre bound:
Now high, now low, their pliant limbs they bend:
And general songs the sprightly revel end.
Thus the broad shield complete the artist crowned
With his last hand, and poured the ocean round:
In living silver seemed the waves to roll,
And beat the buckler’s verge, and bound the whole. 220
This done, whate’er a warrior’s use requires
He forged; the cuirass that outshone the fires,
The greaves of ductile tin, the helm impressed
With various sculpture, and the golden crest.
At Thetis’ feet the finished labour lay:
She, as a falcon cuts the aërial way,
Swift from Olympus’ snowy summit flies,
And bears the blazing present through the skies.


from the nineteenth book of the Iliad

Thetis brings to her son
the armour made by Vulcan....
He arms for the fight

Soon as Aurora heaved her orient head
Above the waves, that blushed with early red,
(With new-born day to gladden mortal sight,
And gild the courts of heaven with sacred light,)
The immortal arms the goddess-mother bears
Swift to her son: her son she finds in tears
Stretched o’er Patroclus’ corpse; while all the rest
Their sovereign’s sorrows in their own expressed.
A ray divine her heavenly presence shed,
And thus, his hand soft touching, Thetis said: 10


[270–8]
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