Dido and Aeneas

Flamboyant at the end,

She bids her sister send

For Aeneas once more-

One last time, the last before

She turns away from the wall

To give the death scene all

She has, her dull passion :

Become a sharp weapon.

Spare, merciless and quick,

That self-hating rhetoric

Lifts the flesh from her bones

And partially atones

For some of her past folly.

That queen, that poor, duped dolly,

Stripped now of all but her

Speech, rises to the pure

Outrage of poetry,

Triumphant, even as he

Flees-who will never return,

Whom she cannot hope to burn

In the fiery crucible

Of her chaste, chastened will. |

And having had her say

She torches her life away:

Flames quiver at her lips.

On one of the adamant ships

Already lost to sight

He thinks ahead; tonight

He will not have a woman.

Already a good Roman,

Already sick of the sea,

He thinks of how easily

The strongest walls are shaken,

How cities may be taken

By cleverness, by force-

Recalling the wooden horse

And the breech made in the wall,

He says to no one at all,

"No fundament of stone

Is safe to build upon;

My city will be made

Of Law; my laws obeyed;

In my earth-wracking city

Will be no room for pity

Or weakness of any kind;

Strict Justice, who is blind,

And angry Mars will keep

My city when I sleep,

A thousand years at least,

Two thousand years or more,

Three thousand years before... ."

Dido cools in the East.