The poem turned up in a MS. book of my father’s, while this article was writing. It is a version of the “Lucius Æmilius Paullus,” already published by Mr Aldis Wright, in vol. ii. p. 483 of the ‘Remains,’ but the two differ so widely that lovers of FitzGerald will be glad to have it. Here, then, it is:—
A Paraphrase by Edward FitzGerald of the Speech of Paullus Æmilius in Livy, lib. xlv. c. 41.
“How prosperously I have served the State,
And how in the Midsummer of Success
A double Thunderbolt from heav’n has struck
On mine own roof, Rome needs not to be told,
Who has so lately witness’d through her Streets,
Together, moving with unequal March,
My Triumph and the Funeral of my Sons.
Yet bear with me if in a few brief words,
And no invidious Spirit, I compare
With the full measure of the general Joy
My private Destitution. When the Fleet
Was all equipp’d, ’twas at the break of day
That I weigh’d anchor from Brundusium;
Before the day went down, with all my Ships
I made Corcyra; thence, upon the fifth,
To Delphi; where to the presiding God
A lustratory Sacrifice I made,
As for myself, so for the Fleet and Army.
Thence in five days I reach’d the Roman camp;
Took the command; re-organis’d the War;
And, for King Perseus would not forth to fight,
And for his camp’s strength could not forth be forced,
I slipped between his Outposts by the woods
At Petra, thence I follow’d him, when he
Fight me must needs, I fought and routed him,
Into the all-constraining Arms of Rome
Reduced all Macedonia.
And this grave War that, growing year by year,
Four Consuls each to each made over worse
Than from his predecessor he took up,
In fifteen days victoriously I closed.
With that the Flood of Fortune, setting in
Roll’d wave on wave upon us. Macedon
Once fall’n, her States and Cities all gave in,
The royal Treasure dropt into my Hands;
And then the King himself, he and his Sons,
As by the finger of the Gods betray’d,
Trapp’d in the Temple they took refuge in.
And now began my over-swelling Fortune
To look suspicious in mine eyes. I fear’d
The dangerous Seas that were to carry back
The fruit of such a Conquest and the Host
Whose arms had reap’d it all. My fear was vain:
The Seas were laid, the Wind was fair, we touch’d
Our own Italian Earth once more. And then
When nothing seem’d to pray for, yet I pray’d;
That because Fortune, having reach’d her height,
Forthwith begins as fatal a decline,
Her fall might but involve myself alone,
And glance beside my Country. Be it so!
By my sole ruin may the jealous Gods
Absolve the Common-weal—by mine—by me,
Of whose triumphal Pomp the front and rear—
O scorn of human Glory—was begun
And closed with the dead bodies of my Sons.
Yes, I the Conqueror, and conquer’d Perseus,
Before you two notorious Monuments
Stand here of human Instability.
He that was late so absolute a King
Now, captive led before my Chariot, sees
His sons led with him captive—but alive;
While I, the Conqueror, scarce had turn’d my face
From one lost son’s still smoking Funeral,
And from my Triumph to the Capitol
Return—return in time to catch the last
Sigh of the last that I might call my Son,
Last of so many Children that should bear
My name to Aftertime. For blind to Fate,
And over-affluent of Posterity,
The two surviving Scions of my Blood
I had engrafted in an alien Stock,
And now, beside himself, no one survives
Of the old House of Paullus.”
Myself, on the whole, I greatly prefer this version to Mr Aldis Wright’s: still, which is the later, which the earlier, it were hard to determine on internal grounds. For, as has befallen many a greater poet, FitzGerald’s
alterations were by no means always improvements. One sees this in the various editions of his masterpiece, the ‘Rubáiyát.’ However, by a comparison of the date (1856) on the fly-leaf of my father’s notebook with that of a published letter of FitzGerald’s to Professor Cowell (May 28, 1868), I am led to conclude that my father’s copy is an early draft.
THE END.
printed by william blackwood and sons.