Explore "At Nineveh" by Madison Cawein on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Written for my friend Walter S. Mathews.
/ There was a princess once, who loved the slave / Of an Assyrian king, her father; known / At Nineveh as Hadria; o'er whose grave / The sands of centuries have long been blown; / Yet sooner shall the night forget its stars / Than love her story: -- How, unto his throne, / One day she came, where, with his warriors, / The king sat in the hall of audience, / 'Mid pillared trophies of barbaric wars, / And, kneeling to him, asked, "O father, whence / Comes love and why? " -- He, smiling on her, said, -- / "O Hadria, love is of the gods, and hence / Divine, is only soul-interpreted. / But why love is, ah, child, we do not know, / Unless 'tis love that gives us life when dead. " -- / And then his daughter, with a face aglow / With all the love that clamored in her blood / Its sweet avowal, lifted arms of snow, / And, like Aurora's rose, before him stood, / Saying, -- "Since love is of the powers above, / I love a slave, O Asshur! Let the good / The gods have giv'n be sanctioned. Speak not of / Dishonor and our line's ancestral dead! / They are imperial dust. I live and love. " --