Virgil

I wait with listening ears.

Obscure they went through dreary shades, that led

Along the waste dominions of the dead.

Give lilies with full hands.

I have lived

and journeyed through the course assigned by fortune.

And now my Shade will pass, illustrious,

beneath the earth.

Amid the friendly silence of the peaceful moon.

They who bettered life on earth by new-found mastery.

Who could tell such things and still refrain from tears?

This man sold his country for gold.

"I shall die unavenged, but I shall die,"

she says. "Thus, thus, I gladly go below

to shadows."

Sorrow too deep to tell, your majesty,

You order me to feel and tell once more.

I sail for Italy not of my own free will.

The only hope for the doomed is no hope at all.