Read "Rome: at the Pyramid of Cestius Near the Graves of Shelley and Keats" by Thomas Hardy online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
(1887)
WHO, then, was Cestius, / And what is he to me? - / Amid thick thoughts and memories multitudinous / One thought alone brings he.
I can recall no word / Of anything he did; / For me he is a man who died and was interred / To leave a pyramid
Whose purpose was exprest / Not with its first design, / Nor till, far down in Time, beside it found their rest / Two countrymen of mine.
Cestius in life, maybe, / Slew, breathed out threatening; / I know not. This I know: in death all silently / He does a kindlier thing,
In beckoning pilgrim feet / With marble finger high / To where, by shadowy wall and history-haunted street, / Those matchless singers lie . . .
-Say, then, he lived and died / That stones which bear his name / Should mark, through Time, where two immortal Shades abide; / It is an ample fame.