The Swan

  Andromache, I think of you! The stream,
  The poor, sad mirror where in bygone days
  Shone all the majesty of your widowed grief,
  The lying Simoïs flooded by your tears,
  Made all my fertile memory blossom forth
  As I passed by the new-built Carrousel.
  Old Paris is no more (a town, alas,
  Changes more quickly than man's heart may change);
  Yet in my mind I still can see the booths;
  The heaps of brick and rough-hewn capitals;
  The grass; the stones all over-green with moss;
  The débris, and the square-set heaps of tiles.

  There a menagerie was once outspread;
  And there I saw, one morning at the hour
  When toil awakes beneath the cold, clear sky,
  And the road roars upon the silent air,
  A swan who had escaped his cage, and walked
  On the dry pavement with his webby feet,
  And trailed his spotless plumage on the ground.

  And near a waterless stream the piteous swan
  Opened his beak, and bathing in the dust
  His nervous wings, he cried (his heart the while
  Filled with a vision of his own fair lake):
  "O water, when then wilt thou come in rain?
  Lightning, when wilt thou glitter?"

  Sometimes yet
  I see the hapless bird—strange, fatal myth—
  Like him that Ovid writes of, lifting up
  Unto the cruelly blue, ironic heavens,
  With stretched, convulsive neck a thirsty face,
  As though he sent reproaches up to God!