O, Athens, city of the beautiful,
Home of all art, all elegance, all grace,
Whose orators and poets sway the soul
As the winds move the sea's unstable face;
O, wondrous city, nurse and home of mind,
This is my oracle to you this day—
No generous growth from starved roots will you find,
But fruitless blossoms weakening to decay.
You take my meaning? Sappho is no more,
And no more Sapphos will be, in your time;
The tree is dead on one side that before
Ran with such burning sap of love and rhyme.
Your glorious city is the utmost flower
Of a one-sided culture, that will spend
Itself upon itself, 'till, hour by hour,
It runs its sources dry, and so must end.
That race is doomed behind whose lattices
Its once free women are constrained to peer
Upon the world of men with vacant eves:
It was not so in Homer's time, I hear.
But Eastern slaves have eaten of your store,
Till in your homes all eating bread are slaves;
They're built into your walls, beside your door,
And bend beneath your lofty architraves.
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