Ye mountain valleys, pitifully groan!
Rivers and Dorian springs, for Bion weep!
Ye plants drop tears; ye groves, lamenting moan!
Exhale your life, wan flowers; your blushes deep
In grief, anemones and roses, steep;
In whimpering murmurs, Hyacinth! Prolong
The sad, sad woe thy lettered petals keep;
Our minstrel sings no more his friends among--
Sicilian Muses! Now begin the doleful song. Ye nightingales! That mid thick leaves set loose
The gushing gurgle of your sorrow, tell
The fountains of Sicilian Arethuse
That Bion is no more--with Bion fell
The song--the music of the Dorian shell.
Ye swans of Strymon! Now your banks along
Your plaintive throats with melting dirges swell
For him, who sang like you the mournful song;
Discourse of Bion's death the Thracian nymphs among-- The Dorian Orpheus, tell them all, is dead.
His herds the song and darling herdsman miss,
And oaks, beneath whose shade he propt his head;
Oblivion's ditty now he sings for Dis;
The melancholy mountain silent is;
His pining cows no longer wish to feed,
But moan for him; Apollo wept, I wis,
For thee, sweet Bion! And in mourning weed
The brotherhood of Fauns, and all the Satyr breed. Sicilian Muses! Lead the doleful chant;
Not so much near the shore the dolphin moans;
Nor so much wails within her rocky haunt
The nightingale; nor on their mountain thrones
The swallows utter such lugubrious tones;
Nor Cë yx such for faithful Halcyon,
Whose song the blue wave, where he perished, owns
Nor in the valley, neighbor to the sun,
The funeral birds so wail their Memnon's tomb upon-- As these moan, wail, and weep for Bion dead,
The nightingales and swallows, whom he taught,
For him their elegiac sadness shed;
And all the birds contagious sorrow caught;
The sylvan realm was all with grief distraught.
Who, bold of heart, will play on Bion's reed,
Fresh from his lip, yet with his breathing fraught?
For still among the reeds does Echo feed
On Bion's minstrelsy, Pan only may succeed To Bion's pipe; to him I make the gift;
But, lest he second seem, e'en Pan may fear
The pipe of Bion to his mouth to lift.
For thee sweet Galatea drops the tear,
And thy dear song regrets, which sitting near
She fondly listed; ever did she flee
The Cyclops and his songs--but ah! More dear
Thy song and sight than her own native sea;
On the deserted sands the nymph without her fee Me with thy minstrel still as proper heir--
Others thou didst endow with thine estate.
Alas! Alas! When in a garden fair
Mallows, crisp dill, and parsley yield to fate,
These with another year regerminate;
But when of mortal life the bloom and crown,
The wise, the good, the valiant, and the great
Succumb to death, in hollow earth shut down,
We sleep, for ever sleep--for ever lie unknown.
- Moschus