Alice Cary: Better dwell the lowliest shepherd of Arcadia’s bowers

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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

American writers on peace and against war

Women writers on peace and war

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Alice Cary
From Hannibal’s Lament for His Brother

“Gaul’s proudest chivalry I ‘ve met in fight,
And trampled them as reeds upon the plain;
Slaughtered at bay, and hunted down in flight,
They cried for quarter, but they cried in vain;
And the blue waters of the Rhone that night
Stood red and stagnant, choked with heaps of slain!”

Were there no spectral shadows gliding there,
0 baffled champion, for thy country’s weal?
No semblances of “angels with bright hair
Dabbled in blood,” to fix the damning seal
To a close-hugged ambition? Better dwell
The lowliest shepherd of Arcadia’s bowers,
Than mount to where the insatiate fire of hell,
Like to a serpent’s tooth, the heart devours!