Explore "Persephone" by Madison Cawein on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
/ O Hades! O false gods! false to yourselves! / O Hades, 'twas thy brother gave her thee / Without a mother's sanction or her knowledge! / He bare her to the horrid gulfs below, / And made her queen, a shadowy queen of shades, / Queen of the fiery flood and mournful realms / Of grating iron and the clank of chains.
/ On blossomed plains in far Trinacria / A maiden, the dark cascade of whose hair / Seemed gleaming rays of midnight 'mid the stars, / Rays slowly bright'ning 'neath a mellow moon, / She 'mid the flowers with the Oceanids / Sought Echo's passion, loved Narcissus pale, / 'Ghast staring in the mirror of a lake, / Whose smoothness brake his image, flickering seen, / E'en with the fast tears of his dewy eyes. / A shape there rose with iron wain and steeds / 'Mid sallow fume of sulphur and pale fires; / Its countenance meager, and its eyes e'en such / As the wild, ghastly sulphur. In its arms, / Its sooty arms, where like to supple steel / The muscles rigid lay, unto its breast, / Such as its arms, it rushed her fragile form / As bosomed bulks of tempest in their joy / With arms of winds drag to their black embrace / A fairy mist of white that flecks the summer / With shadeless wings of gauze, and 'tis no more / Heaved on the rapture of its thundering heart.