Monday 22 September 2014

Pindus Mountains, Epirus, Greece; William Haygarth, Greece, A Poem, 1814 - and a View



"The Summit of Mt. Pindus"

From William Haygarth, Greece, A Poem, 1814

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"With what impatience do I spring to thee,
Eternal Nature:
O let me seek thy haunts upon the brow
Of Pindus, where thou dwell'st midst solitude
Of stern sublimity: with slow, slow step,
Painfully press'd upon th' unyielding rock,
I scale its rugged steeps...
She calls the sons
Of Virtue, those whose spirits soar beyond
The narrow prison of their earthly frame
To scenes more glorious..."


From Haygarth's Notes:

"The passage of Pindus presents some of the grandest scenery that is to be met with in Greece...The general style of its scenery is sublimity; it does not descend even to the beautiful, but impresses on the mind of the traveller the ideas of wildness and solitude, which are so favourable to the cultivation of poetic genius. The savage grandeur of mountain districts appears to have been always selected by the Greeks for the residence of those deities which preside over the powers of their imagination...I have already remarked that the prominent features of that district of Epirus in which entrance to the infernal regions was placed, are particularly calculated to overwhelm the imagination with the terrors which it was necessary to excite".

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