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        THE TOWER OF MUNION

Dark-shadow’d giant! shame of proud Castille,
    Castle without bridge, battlements or towers,
In whose wide halls now loathsome reptiles steal,
    Where nobles once and warriors held their bowers!
Tell me, where are they? where thy tapestries gay,
    Thy hundred troubadours of lofty song?
Thy mouldering ruins in the vale decay,
    Thou humbled warrior! time has quell’d the strong:
Thy name and history to oblivion thrown,
The world forgets that there thou standst, Munion.

To me thou art a spectre, shade of grief!
    With black remembrances my soul’s o’ercast;
To me thou art a palm with wither’d leaf,
    Burnt by the lightning, bow’d beneath the blast.
I, wandering bard, proscribed perchance my doom
    In the bier’s dust nor name, nor glory know;
With useless toil my brow’s consumed in gloom;
    Of her I loved, dark dwelling-place below,
Whom I was robb’d of, angel from above,
Cursed be thy name, thy soil, as was my love.

There rest, aye, in thy loftiness,
     To shame the plain around,
Warderless castle, matron lone,
     In whom no beauty’s found.
At thee time laughs, thy towers o’erthrown,
     Scorn’d by thy vassals, by thy Lord
Deserted, rest, black skeleton!
     Stain of the vale’s green sward.

Priestless hermitage of Castille,
     On thee no banners wave;
Unblazon’d gate, thy pointed vaults
     No more their weight can save:
Thou hast no soldier on thy heights,
     No echo in thy halls,
And rank weeds festering grow uncheck’d
     Beneath thy mouldering walls.

Chieftain dead in a foreign land,
     Forgotten of thy race,
While storm-torn fragments from thy brow
     Are scatter’d o’er thy place;
And men pass careless at thy feet,
     Nor seek thy tale to find;
Because thy history is not read,
     Thy name’s not in their mind.

But thou hast one, who in a luckless hour
     Inscribed another’s name on thy worn stone:
’Twas I, and that my deep relentless shame
     Remains with thee alone.
When my lips named that name, they play’d me false;
     When my hands graved it, ’twas a like deceit;
Now it exists not; in time’s impious course
     ’Twas swept beneath his feet.

     And that celestial name,
        To time at length a prey,
     A woman for my sin,
        For a seraph snatch’d away;
     The hurricane of life
        Has left me, loved one, worse
     For my eternal grief,
        In pledge as of a curse,
Thy name ne’er from my thoughts to part,
Nor thy love ever from my heart.

autógrafo

José Zorrilla
Translation by James Kennedy


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James Kennedy. "Modern poets and poetry of Spain" (1860). Produced by Cornell University Library, 1992.