ON HANNIBAL, GENERAL

ON HANNIBAL, GENERAL

ON HANNIBAL, GENERAL

Consider glorious Hannibal: how more in the end did he weigh
than his raging body? The man whom all his continent
could not contain, from the Moorish sea to the hot Nile,
all Ethiopia and its elephants, he of the scorpion-strike.
Adds to his kingdom Spain, overleaps the Pyrenees,
leads his hundred thousand over the Alps of snow,
cleaving the very rock; to possess all Italy he swarms down.
“Nothing,” he vows, “is done until my Carthage
bursts their gate to plant our standard there.”
What a rich spectacle that one eyed-stoic general,
His kinky flaming hair – the African who conquered Rome!
Behind his back the base he as a boy, keen for carnage,
had meant to save, sixteen years before, is taken.
To shelter he flees in another’s shade, a fretting exile –
the liberator of an empire, fallen into wounded age.
Once the world was stirred never to be the same again,
by Hannibal Barca, whom no sword but his own might pierce.
How vain are human wishes! He is mere flesh for a ransom!
Just so that we may declaim all his lost deeds,
sing his praise-song for ever, with no mention of his defeat.