Light within the Shade: Eight Hundred Years of Hungarian Poetry

Monstrous Days

sá n dor pe tőf i | 63 Monstrous Days Monstrous days, monstrous days! Monstrousness waxing in its ways. Has Heaven, in wrath, Taken an oath To crush the Magyar nation? Our every limb’s a bleeding gash, Small wonder, when against us flash The swords of half creation. And now before us looms up War, And scarcely less, but sad the more, What drives us hence: Grim Pestilence. O Homeland, how you must writhe Under the curse of God, while still Upon your marches reaps at will Fleshless Death’s two-handed scythe. And shall we all be lost? Or still Someone survive our wreck who will Write down in rhymes These wild black times, Giving witness as is fit? And if one such remains, how shall He rightly mourn our funeral, That the world may know of it? And if he truly testify, To all that we have lived through, why Should one who heard Believe his word Of so much grief and sorrow?— And not take all this tale in doubt, 64 | Light within the Shade As what a mad brain monsters out Upon that distant morrow? 1849 ...