Dark in the west the sunset’s somber
wrack
Unrolled vast walls the rams of war had
split,
Along whose battlements the battle lit
Tempestuous beacons; and, with gates hurled
back,
A mighty city, red with ruin and sack,
Through burning breaches, crumbling bit
by bit,
Showed where the God of Slaughter seemed
to sit
With conflagration glaring at each crack.
Who knows? perhaps as sleep unto us makes
Our dreams as real as our waking seems
With recollections time can not destroy,
So in the mind of Nature now awakes
Haply some wilder memory, and she dreams
The stormy story of the fall of Troy.