Clitumnus

(Childe Harold, Canto iv. Stanzas 66, 67.)

  BUT thou, Clitumnus! in the sweetest wave
  Of the most living crystal that was e’er
  The haunt of river nymph, to gaze and lave
  Her limbs where nothing hid them, thou dost rear
  Thy grassy banks whereon the milk-white steer
  Grazes; the purest god of gentle waters!
  And most serene of aspect, and most clear;
  Surely that stream was unprofaned by slaughters—
A mirror and a bath for Beauty’s youngest daughters!

  And on thy happy shore a Temple still,
  Of small and delicate proportion, keeps,
  Upon a mild declivity of hill,
  Its memory of thee; beneath it sweeps
  Thy current’s calmness; oft from out it leaps
  The finny darter with the glittering scales,
  Who dwells and revels in thy glassy deeps;
  While, chance, some scatter’d water-lily sails
Down where the shallower wave still tells its bubbling tales.

Published in Poetry of Byron

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