Ballads in Blue China: Bion

Bion

The wail of Moschus on the mountains crying
The Muses heard, and loved it long ago;
They heard the hollows of the hills replying,
They heard the weeping water's overflow;
They winged the sacred strain--the song undying,
The song that all about the world must go,--
When poets for a poet dead are sighing,
The minstrels for a minstrel friend laid low.

And dirge to dirge that answers, and the weeping
For Adonais by the summer sea,
The plaints for Lycidas, and Thyrsis (sleeping
Far from 'the forest ground called Thessaly'),
These hold thy memory, Bion, in their keeping,
And are but echoes of the moan for thee.

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