ODE XII.—ON A SWALLOW.
What punishment shall I decree,
Vexatious, chattering bird, to thee?
Say, shall I clip thy restless wing?
Or, like the cruel Thracian king,[1]
Tear out that tongue whose noisy scream
Has loused me from so sweet a dream?
For oh! methought my love was nigh,
Till, startled by thy twittering cry,
She fled upon the wings of morn,[2]
And left me joyless and forlorn.
- ↑ Tereus, king of Thrace, for whose story the reader is referred to the sixth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Though Anacreon seems to adopt the less usual acceptation of the fable, that it was Philomela, and not Progne, who was transformed into a swallow.
- ↑ Horace has a similar idea in the first ode of the fourth book, which has been thus admirably imitated by Pope:—
"Thee, dress'd in fancy's airy beam,
Absent I follow through th' extended dream;
Now, now I seize, I clasp thy charms,
And now you burst (ah, cruel!) from my arms;
And swiftly shoot along the mall,
Or softly glide by the canal;
Now shorn by Cynthia's silver ray,
And now on rolling waters snatch'd away."