The Parthenon Marbles by Christopher Hitchens

Author:Christopher Hitchens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

This is a poem of, perhaps, more merit in feeling than in execution. It is decidedly superior to Thomas Hardy’s sentimental Christmas in the Elgin Room, which was begun in 1905:

‘What is the noise that shakes the night,

And seems to soar to the Pole-star height?’

‘Christmas bells,

The watchman tells,

Who walks this hall that blears us captives with its blight.’

‘And what, then, mean such clangs, so clear?’

‘’Tis said to have been a day of cheer,

And source of grace

To the human race

Long ere their woven sails winged us to exile here.

‘We are those whom Christmas overthrew

Some centuries after Pheidias knew

How to shape us

And bedrape us

And to set us in Athena’s temple for men’s view.

‘O it is sad now we are sold –

We gods! for Borean people’s gold,

And brought to the gloom

Of this gaunt room

Which sunlight shuns, and sweet Aurore but enters cold.

‘For all these bells, would I were still

Radiant as on Athena’s Hill.’

‘And I, and I!’

The others sigh,

‘Before this Christ was known, and we had men’s good will.’

Thereat old Helios could but nod,

Throbbed, too, the Ilissus River-god,

And the torsos there

Of deities fair,

Whose limbs were shards beneath some Acropolitan clod:

Demeter too, Poseidon hoar,

Persephone, and many more

Of Zeus’ high breed,

All loth to heed

What the bells sang that night which shook them to the core.

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