The Æneids of Virgil, Done into English VerseVirgil
General
The Æneids of Virgil, Done into English Verse
Virgil
Aeneas (Legendary character) -- Poetry; Epic poetry, Latin -- Translations into English
Thus as he cried the whistling North fell on with sudden gale
And drave the seas up toward the stars, and smote aback the sail;
Then break the oars, the bows fall off, and beam on in the trough
She lieth, and the sea comes on a mountain huge and rough.
These hang upon the topmost wave, and those may well discern
The sea's ground mid the gaping whirl: with sand the surges churn.
Three keels the South wind cast away on hidden reefs that lie
Midmost the sea, the Altars called by men of Italy,
A huge back thrusting through the tide: three others from the deep 110
The East toward straits, and swallowing sands did miserably sweep,
And dashed them on the shoals, and heaped the sand around in ring:
And one, a keel the Lycians manned, with him, the trusty King
Orontes, in Æneas' sight a toppling wave o'erhung,
And smote the poop, and headlong rolled, adown the helmsman flung;
Then thrice about the driving flood hath hurled her as she lay,
The hurrying eddy swept above and swallowed her from day:
And lo! things swimming here and there, scant in the unmeasured seas,
The arms of men, and painted boards, and Trojan treasuries.
And now Ilioneus' stout ship, her that Achates leal 120
And Abas ferried o'er the main, and old Aletes' keel
The storm hath overcome; and all must drink the baneful stream
Through opening leaky sides of them that gape at every seam.
But meanwhile Neptune, sorely moved, hath felt the storm let go,
And all the turmoil of the main with murmur great enow;
The deep upheaved from all abodes the lowest that there be:
So forth he put his placid face o'er topmost of the sea,
And there he saw Æneas' ships o'er all the main besprent,
The Trojans beaten by the flood and ruin from heaven sent.
But Juno's guile and wrathful heart her brother knew full well: 130
So East and West he called to him, and spake such words to tell:
"What mighty pride of race of yours hath hold upon your minds,
That earth and sea ye turmoil so without my will, O winds;
That such upheaval and so great ye dare without my will?
Whom I--But first it comes to hand the troubled flood to still:
For such-like fault henceforward though with nought so light ye pay.
Go get you gone, and look to it this to your king to say:
That ocean's realm and three-tined spear of dread are given by Fate
Not unto him but unto me? he holds the cliffs o'ergreat,
Thine houses, Eurus; in that hall I bid him then be bold, 140
Thine Æolus, and lord it o'er his winds in barred hold."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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