Crowd.
Another Bull! another Bull!
Ox.
You heard?
Your number’s up, the people gave the word!
Bull.
Feasted on flowers, the darling of the days,
To-day I’ve ghastly asphodels to graze,
Harsh sand to bite, and my own blood to swill—
Whose dewlap loved the golden-rolling rill,
When through the rushes, burnished like its tide,
The lovely cirrus of my thews would slide,
My heart flame-glazing through the silken skin
Joy of its mighty furnace lit within.
These crescent horns that scimitared the moon,
These eyes, the flaming emeralds of noon,
Whose orbs were fuel to the deathless rays
And burned the long horizon with their gaze—
All now to be cut down, and soon to trail
A sledge of carrion at a horse’s tail!
Ox.
Flame in the flaming noon, I’ve seen you run.
The Anvil of Toledo’s now your Sun,
Whose angry dawn beyond these gates has spread
Its crimson cape, the sunrise of the dead:
Whose iron clangs for you, whose doom you feel,
The target of its burnished ray of steel!
Bull.
Ox as you are, what should you know of this
Who never neared the verge of that abyss?
Ox.
Ox as I am, none better knows than I
Who led your father’s father here to die.
Declaiming clown, I am the mute, the wise;
Poets would read enigmas in my eyes.
My being is confederate with pain,
Mine to endure as yours is to complain;
I am the thinker, satisfied to know,
And bought this wisdom for a life of woe.
Be brave, be patient, and reserve your breath.
Bull.
But tell me what is blacker than this Death?
Ox.
My impotence.
Bull.
It was your soul that spoke!—
More hideous than this martyrdom?
Ox.
The Yoke!