By that contagion and the toil which then
  A sense of honour and the pleading voice
  Of weary watchers, mixed with voice of wail
  Of dying folk, forced them to undergo.
  This kind of death each nobler soul would meet.
  The funerals, uncompanioned, forsaken,
  Like rivals contended to be hurried through.

  And men contending to ensepulchre
  Pile upon pile the throng of their own dead:
  And weary with woe and weeping wandered home;
  And then the most would take to bed from grief.
  Nor could be found not one, whom nor disease
  Nor death, nor woe had not in those dread times
  Attacked.

    By now the shepherds and neatherds all,
  Yea, even the sturdy guiders of curved ploughs,
  Began to sicken, and their bodies would lie
  Huddled within back-corners of their huts,
  Delivered by squalor and disease to death.
  O often and often couldst thou then have seen
  On lifeless children lifeless parents prone,
  Or offspring on their fathers', mothers' corpse
  Yielding the life. And into the city poured
  O not in least part from the countryside
  That tribulation, which the peasantry
  Sick, sick, brought thither, thronging from every quarter,
  Plague-stricken mob. All places would they crowd,
  All buildings too; whereby the more would death
  Up-pile a-heap the folk so crammed in town.
  Ah, many a body thirst had dragged and rolled
  Along the highways there was lying strewn
  Besides Silenus-headed water-fountains,-
  The life-breath choked from that too dear desire
  Of pleasant waters. Ah, everywhere along
  The open places of the populace,
  And along the highways, O thou mightest see
  Of many a half-dead body the sagged limbs,
  Rough with squalor, wrapped around with rags,
  Perish from very nastiness, with naught
  But skin upon the bones, well-nigh already
  Buried- in ulcers vile and obscene filth.
  All holy temples, too, of deities
  Had Death becrammed with the carcasses;
  And stood each fane of the Celestial Ones
  Laden with stark cadavers everywhere-
  Places which warders of the shrines had crowded
  With many a guest. For now no longer men
  Did mightily esteem the old Divine,
  The worship of the gods: the woe at hand
  Did over-master. Nor in the city then
  Remained those rites of sepulture, with which
  That pious folk had evermore been wont
  To buried be. For it was wildered all
  In wild alarms, and each and every one
  With sullen sorrow would bury his own dead,
  As present shift allowed. And sudden stress
  And poverty to many an awful act
  Impelled; and with a monstrous screaming they
  Would, on the frames of alien funeral pyres,
  Place their own kin, and thrust the torch beneath
  Oft brawling with much bloodshed round about
  Rather than quit dead bodies loved in life.

                      -THE END-
.