No More Learning

15.
The fish were poisoned in the streams; the birds
In the green woods perished; the insect race _3920
Was withered up; the scattered flocks and herds
Who had survived the wild beasts' hungry chase
Died moaning, each upon the other's face
In helpless agony gazing; round the City
All night, the lean hyaenas their sad case _3925
Like starving infants wailed; a woeful ditty!
And many a mother wept, pierced with unnatural pity.

16.
Amid the aereal minarets on high,
The Ethiopian vultures fluttering fell
From their long line of brethren in the sky, _3930
Startling the concourse of mankind. --Too well
These signs the coming mischief did foretell:--
Strange panic first, a deep and sickening dread
Within each heart, like ice, did sink and dwell,
A voiceless thought of evil, which did spread _3935
With the quick glance of eyes, like withering lightnings shed.

17.
Day after day, when the year wanes, the frosts
Strip its green crown of leaves, till all is bare;
So on those strange and congregated hosts
Came Famine, a swift shadow, and the air _3940
Groaned with the burden of a new despair;
Famine, than whom Misrule no deadlier daughter
Feeds from her thousand breasts, though sleeping there
With lidless eyes, lie Faith, and Plague, and Slaughter,
A ghastly brood; conceived of Lethe's sullen water. _3945

18.
There was no food, the corn was trampled down,
The flocks and herds had perished; on the shore
The dead and putrid fish were ever thrown;
The deeps were foodless, and the winds no more
Creaked with the weight of birds, but, as before _3950
Those winged things sprang forth, were void of shade;
The vines and orchards, Autumn's golden store,
Were burned;--so that the meanest food was weighed
With gold, and Avarice died before the god it made.

19.
There was no corn--in the wide market-place _3955
All loathliest things, even human flesh, was sold;
They weighed it in small scales--and many a face
Was fixed in eager horror then: his gold
The miser brought; the tender maid, grown bold
Through hunger, bared her scorned charms in vain; _3960
The mother brought her eldest born, controlled
By instinct blind as love, but turned again
And bade her infant suck, and died in silent pain.

20.
Then fell blue Plague upon the race of man.
'O, for the sheathed steel, so late which gave _3965
Oblivion to the dead, when the streets ran
With brothers' blood!
O, that the earthquake's grave
Would gape, or Ocean lift its stifling wave! '
Vain cries--throughout the streets thousands pursued
Each by his fiery torture howl and rave, _3970
Or sit in frenzy's unimagined mood,
Upon fresh heaps of dead; a ghastly multitude.

21.
It was not hunger now, but thirst. Each well
Was choked with rotting corpses, and became
A cauldron of green mist made visible _3975
At sunrise. Thither still the myriads came,
Seeking to quench the agony of the flame,
Which raged like poison through their bursting veins;
Naked they were from torture, without shame,
Spotted with nameless scars and lurid blains, _3980
Childhood, and youth, and age, writhing in savage pains.

22.
It was not thirst, but madness! Many saw
Their own lean image everywhere, it went
A ghastlier self beside them, till the awe
Of that dread sight to self-destruction sent _3985
Those shrieking victims; some, ere life was spent,
Sought, with a horrid sympathy, to shed
Contagion on the sound; and others rent
Their matted hair, and cried aloud, 'We tread
On fire! the avenging Power his hell on earth has spread! ' _3990

23.
Sometimes the living by the dead were hid.
Near the great fountain in the public square,
Where corpses made a crumbling pyramid
Under the sun, was heard one stifled prayer
For life, in the hot silence of the air; _3995
And strange 'twas, amid that hideous heap to see
Some shrouded in their long and golden hair,
As if not dead, but slumbering quietly
Like forms which sculptors carve, then love to agony.

24.
Famine had spared the palace of the king:-- _4000
He rioted in festival the while,
He and his guards and priests; but Plague did fling
One shadow upon all. Famine can smile
On him who brings it food, and pass, with guile
Of thankful falsehood, like a courtier gray, _4005
The house-dog of the throne; but many a mile
Comes Plague, a winged wolf, who loathes alway
The garbage and the scum that strangers make her prey.