Translated from the French of Joachim Du Bellay’s Les Antiquitez de Rome (1558) by Karl Kirchwey

27.

Rome astonishes you, who contemplate
the ancient pride that once outfaced the skies,
audacious hills and shattered palaces,
the walls and arches, baths and temples—yet
consider how time’s power to devastate
block on grand block has had another purpose,
supplying living masons at their labors
with antique fragments to incorporate.
Then look again, and understand the way
Rome sifts the strata of her own heyday,
rebuilds herself from many divine works:
you will conclude the demon of the land
endeavors once more with a fatal hand
to resurrect these broken dusty bricks.

Karl Kirchwey is the author of six books of poems, A Wandering Island (Princeton University Press, 1990; recipient of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America), Those I Guard (Harcourt Brace and Company, 1993), The Engrafted Word (Henry Holt, 1998; a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”), At the Palace of Jove (Putnam, 2002), The Happiness of This World: Poetry and Prose (2007), and Mount Lebanon (Marian Wood Books/Putnam, 2011). Poems Under Saturn, his translation of Paul Verlaine’s Poemes saturniens, was published by Princeton University Press in 2011.

Piranesi’s Temple of Neptune, looking through the peristyle from the north-west corner, showing the internal colonnades and the Basilica in the distance.