Explore "The Sibyl" by Robert Graves on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Her hand falls helpless: thought amazements fly / Far overhead, they leave no record mark -- / Wild swans urged whistling across dazzled sky, / Or Gabriel hounds in chorus through the dark.
Yet when she prophesies, each spirit swan, / Each spectral hound from memory's windy zones, / Flies back to inspire one limb-strewn skeleton / Of thousands in her valley of dry bones.
There as those life-restored battalions shout, / Succession flags and Time goes maimed in flight: / From each live gullet twenty swans glide out / With hell-packs loathlier yet to amaze the night.
Gabriel hounds, a spectral pack hunting the souls of the damned / through the air at night: the origin of this belief some find in / the strange noise made by the passage of flocks of wild geese or / swans.