Marco Bozzaris

At midnight, in his guarded tent,The Turk was dreaming of the hourWhen Greece, her knee in suppliance bent,Should tremble at his power:In dreams, through camp and court, he boreThe trophies of a conqueror;In dreams his song of triumph heard;Then wore his monarch’s signet ring:Then pressed that monarch’s throne--a king;As wild his thoughts, and gay of wing,As Eden’s garden bird.

At midnight, in the forest shades,Bozzaris ranged his Suliote band,True as the steel of their tried blades,Heroes in heart and hand.There had the Persian’s thousands stood,There had the glad earth drunk their bloodOn old Platæa’s day;And now there breathed that haunted airThe sons of sires who conquered there,With arm to strike and soul to dare,As quick, as far as they.

An hour passed on--the Turk awoke;That bright dream was his last;He woke--to hear his sentries shriek,“To arms! they come! the Greek! the Greek!”He woke--to die midst flame, and smoke,And shout, and groan, and sabre-stroke,And death-shots falling thick and fastAs lightnings from the mountain-cloud;And heard, with voice as trumpet loud,Bozzaris cheer his band:“Strike--till the last armed foe expires;Strike--for your altars and your fires;Strike--for the green graves of your sires;God--and your native land!”

They fought--like brave men, long and well;They piled that ground with Moslem slain,They conquered--but Bozzaris fell,Bleeding at every vein.His few surviving comrades sawHis smile when rang their proud hurrah,And the red field was won;Then saw in death his eyelids closeCalmly, as to a night’s repose,Like flowers at set of sun.

Come to the bridal-chamber, Death!Come to the mother’s, when she feels,For the first time, her first-born’s breath;Come when the blessed sealsThat close the pestilence are broke,And crowded cities wail its stroke;Come in consumption’s ghastly form,The earthquake shock, the ocean storm;Come when the heart beats high and warmWith banquet-song, and dance, and wine;And thou art terrible--the tear,The groan, the knell, the pall, the bier,And all we know, or dream, or fearOf agony, are thine.

But to the hero, when his swordHas won the battle for the free,Thy voice sounds like a prophet’s word;And in its hollow tones are heardThe thanks of millions yet to be.Come, when his task of fame is wrought--Come, with her laurel-leaf, blood-bought--Come in her crowning hour--and thenThy sunken eye’s unearthly lightTo him is welcome as the sightOf sky and stars to prisoned men;Thy grasp is welcome as the handOf brother in a foreign land;Thy summons welcome as the cryThat told the Indian isles were nighTo the world-seeking Genoese,When the land wind, from woods of palm,And orange-groves, and fields of balm,Blew o’er the Haytian seas.

Bozzaris! with the storied braveGreece nurtured in her glory’s time,Rest thee--there is no prouder grave,Even in her own proud clime.She wore no funeral-weeds for thee,Nor bade the dark hearse wave its plumeLike torn branch from death’s leafless treeIn sorrow’s pomp and pageantry,The heartless luxury of the tomb;But she remembers thee as oneLong loved and for a season gone;For thee her poet’s lyre is wreathed,Her marble wrought, her music breathed;For thee she rings the birthday bells;Of thee her babe’s first lisping tells;For thine her evening prayer is saidAt palace-couch and cottage-bed;Her soldier, closing with the foe,Gives for thy sake a deadlier blow,His plighted maiden, when she fearsFor him the joy of her young years,Thinks of thy fate, and checks her tears;And she, the mother of thy boys,Though in her eye and faded cheekIs read the grief she will not speak,The memory of her buried joys,And even she who gave thee birth,Will, by their pilgrim-circled hearth,Talk of thy doom without a sigh;For thou art Freedom’s now, and Fame’s:One of the few, the immortal names,That were not born to die.