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It is pleasant when your child says what you want to say.
if a wolf comes here I will call him brother.”
Though I suffered grief, I was doomed to sanity.
In truth he gave me nothing but a name, and I have filled it with myself.
I think the gods knew when it was time to come home.
a shadow in shadows.
But he did not sing me enough life to die. He only gave me immortality.
i, i, I cry: Go on, go.
Only sometimes my soul wakes as a woman again, and then when I listen I can hear silence, and in the silence his voice.
I think the poem ends where Vergil wanted it to end.
the unfolding of a hint.
Vergil’s Latium, by Bertha Tilly,
Where man goes, trees die; or, to paraphrase Tacitus, we make a desert and call it progress.
early Rome: the dark, plain Republic, a forum not of marble but of wood and brick, an austere people with a strong sense of duty, order, and justice:
They were coarse, they were brutal, and they were tremendously different from us, but it is hard to feel them as essentially foreign when so much of our cultural heritage comes directly from them, half our language, most of our concept of law . . . and perhaps also certain homely but delicate values, such as the loyalty, modesty, and responsibility implicit in Vergil’s idea of a hero.
