Poem by Maria Jane Jewsbury

The Syren World

The curtain's drawn look there and you shall spy
The faded god of your idolatry.
Davenant.

WORLD thou art old and grey!
World thou art wearing away!
What of thy roses, beauty and power?
There's a blight on the leaf, a worm in the flower;
What are brave triumphs bravely won?
Dreams revived of the days long gone,
Dreams forgotten ere these be done!
Princes in purple, and ladies in pall,
Masque, and music, and revel in hall,
Grey haired wisdom and bright eyed youth,
Pleasures and treasures fair in sooth
Thou hast them all, and they grace thee well!
Yet through thy music I hear the knell;
Yet through thy gilding I mark the rust;
Yet on thy trappings I view the dust:
Thou hast painted again the faded past,
Spells and sunbeams over it cast,
And called it the present, and bade men be
Blind to the future and worship thee.
Thou wert a Syren, and souls thy prey,
Till the Deluge swept thee awhile away;
Thou didst rise again from the whelming flood
Still a Syren and unsubdued;
Ever deceiving since man had breath,
All to sorrow and most to death.
Thy changes are nought but of mode and time,
Thou art the same in each varying clime;
Thy shrine a rainbow, thy crown of flowers,
Renewed as they wither with fresh from the bowers
Thy smile, like a summer's day bright and bold
That dawns in roses and sets in gold;
Thy melting voice and beguiling brow,
Soft as the dew that drops from the bough,
Each word a promise, each look a vow.
But sorrow and death unmask thy charms,
And the victims shrink from thy twining arms,
Feeling thy pleasures, viewing thy bloom,
Changed to darkness, and dust, and doom!
But others arise in their place and thou
Art still a Syren-World as now.

1. The Oceanides. No. 7. The Spirit of the Cape
2. The Oceanides. No. 4. The Sunken Rock
3. Address to Sleep
4. Lines Written after Reading Sir Edward Seaward's Narrative
5. The Oceanides. No. 3. The Burden of the Sea

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