Jerusalem Delivered - Torquato Tasso

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Are for thy soul the cradle and the nest,

       There live, for here thy glory never dies:

       For like a Christian knight and champion blest

       Thou didst both live and die: now feed thine eyes

       With thy Redeemer's sight, where crowned with bliss

       Thy faith, zeal, merit, well-deserving is.

      LXIX

       "Our loss, not thine, provokes these plaints and tears:

       For when we lost thee, then our ship her mast,

       Our chariot lost her wheels, their points our spears,

       The bird of conquest her chief feather cast:

       But though thy death far from our army hears

       Her chiefest earthly aid, in heaven yet placed

       Thou wilt procure its help Divine, so reaps

       He that sows godly sorrow, joy by heaps.

      LXX

       "For if our God the Lord Armipotent

       Those armed angels in our aid down send

       That were at Dothan to his prophet sent,

       Thou wilt come down with them, and well defend

       Our host, and with thy sacred weapons bent

       Gainst Sion's fort, these gates and bulwarks rend,

       That so by hand may win this hold, and we

       May in these temples praise our Christ for thee."

      LXXI

       Thus he complained; but now the sable shade

       Ycleped night, had thick enveloped

       The sun in veil of double darkness made;

       Sleep, eased care; rest, brought complaint to bed:

       All night the wary duke devising laid

       How that high wall should best be battered,

       How his strong engines he might aptly frame,

       And whence get timber fit to build the same.

      LXXII

       Up with the lark the sorrowful duke arose,

       A mourner chief at Dudon's burial,

       Of cypress sad a pile his friends compose

       Under a hill o'ergrown with cedars tall,

       Beside the hearse a fruitful palm-tree grows,

       Ennobled since by this great funeral,

       Where Dudon's corpse they softly laid in ground,

       The priest sung hymns, the soldiers wept around.

      LXXIII

       Among the boughs, they here and there bestow

       Ensigns and arms, as witness of his praise,

       Which he from Pagan lords, that did them owe,

       Had won in prosperous fights and happy frays:

       His shield they fixed on the hole below,

       And there this distich under-writ, which says,

       "This palm with stretched arms, doth overspread

       The champion Dudon's glorious carcase dead."

      LXXIV

       This work performed with advisement good,

       Godfrey his carpenters, and men of skill

       In all the camp, sent to an aged wood,

       With convoy meet to guard them safe from ill.

       Within a valley deep this forest stood,

       To Christian eyes unseen, unknown, until

       A Syrian told the duke, who thither sent

       Those chosen workmen that for timber went.

      LXXV

       And now the axe raged in the forest wild,

       The echo sighed in the groves unseen,

       The weeping nymphs fled from their bowers exiled,

       Down fell the shady tops of shaking treen,

       Down came the sacred palms, the ashes wild,

       The funeral cypress, holly ever green,

       The weeping fir, thick beech, and sailing pine,

       The married elm fell with his fruitful vine.

      LXXVI

       The shooter grew, the broad-leaved sycamore,

       The barren plantain, and the walnut sound,

       The myrrh, that her foul sin doth still deplore,

       The alder owner of all waterish ground,

       Sweet juniper, whose shadow hurteth sore,

       Proud cedar, oak, the king of forests crowned;

       Thus fell the trees, with noise the deserts roar;

       The beasts, their caves, the birds, their nests forlore.

       Table of Contents

      THE ARGUMENT.

       Satan his fiends and spirits assembleth all,

       And sends them forth to work the Christians woe,

       False Hidraort their aid from hell doth call,

       And sends Armida to entrap his foe:

       She tells her birth, her fortune, and her fall,

       Asks aid, allures and wins the worthies so

       That they consent her enterprise to prove;

       She wins them with deceit, craft, beauty, love.

      I

       While thus their work went on with lucky speed,

       And reared rams their horned fronts advance,

       The Ancient Foe to man, and mortal seed,

       His wannish eyes upon them bent askance;

       And when he saw their labors well succeed,

       He wept for rage, and threatened dire mischance.

       He choked his curses, to himself he spake,

       Such noise wild bulls that softly bellow make.

      II

       At last resolving in his damned thought

       To find some let to stop their warlike feat,

       He gave command his princes should be brought

       Before the throne of his infernal seat.

       O fool! as if it were a thing of naught

       God to resist, or change his purpose great,

       Who on his foes doth thunder in his ire,

       Whose arrows hailstones he and coals of fire.

      III

       The dreary trumpet blew a dreadful blast,

       And rumbled through the lands and kingdoms under,

       Through wasteness wide it roared, and hollows vast,

       And filled the deep with horror, fear and wonder,

       Not half so dreadful noise the tempests cast,

       That fall from skies with storms of hail and thunder,

       Not half so loud the whistling winds do sing,

       Broke from the earthen prisons of their King.

      IV

       The peers

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