A post-election poem by Alan Tate

• Aeneas at Washington
• I myself saw furious with blood
• Neoptolemus, at his side the black Atridae,
• Hecuba and the hundred daughters, Priam
• Cut down, his filth drenching the holy fires.
• In that extremity I bore me well,
• A true gentleman, valorous in arms,
• Distinterested and honourable. Then fled
• That was a time when civilization
• Run by the few fell to the many, and
• Crashed to the shout of men, the clang of arms: 
• Cold victualing I seized, I hoisted up
• The old man my father upon my back,
• In the smoke made by sea for a new world
• Saving little—a mind imperishable
• If time is, a love of past things tenuous
• As the hesitation of receding love.

• (To the reduction of uncitied littorals
• We brought chiefly the vigor of prophecy,
• Our hunger breeding calculation
• And fixed triumphs)

• I saw the thirsty dove
• In the glowing fields of Troy, hemp ripening
• And tawny corn, the thickening Blue Grass
• All lying rich forever in the green sun.
• I see all things apart, the towers that men
• Contrive I too contrived long, long ago.
• Now I demand little. The singular passion
• Abides its object and consumes desire
• In the circling shadow of its appetite.
• There was a time when the young eyes were slow,
• Their flame steady beyond the firstling fire,

• I stood in the rain, far from home at nightfall
• By the Potomac, the great Dome lit the water,
• The city my blood had built I knew no more
• While the screech-owl whistled his new delight
• Consecutively dark.

• Stuck in the wet mire
• Four thousand leagues from the ninth buried city
• I thought of Troy, what we had built her for.

Allen Tate (1899-1979) was an American poet and one of the leading talents among the Southern writers’ group known as the Fugitives, which was founded in 1919-1920 and included John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren. Greatly influenced by T.S. Eliot and the Modernist movement in literature in general, Tate brought to the Fugitive movement — and through this group, to the wider world — a modern sensitivity tempered by classical erudition that informed his attempts through his creative work to restore and celebrate all that was good and noble in Southern culture and history. He was poet laureate of the United States from 1943-1944, and was awarded the Bollingen Prize in Poetry for 1956.