The threshold passed, the road leads on
To Tartarus and to Acheron.
At distance rolls the infernal flood,
Seething and swollen with turbid mud,
And into dark Cocytus pours
The burden of its oozy stores.
Grim, squalid, foul, with aspect dire,
His eye-balls each a globe of fire,
The watery passage Charon keeps,
Sole warden of those murky deeps:
A sordid mantle round him thrown
Girds breast and shoulder like a zone.
He plies the pole with dexterous ease,
Or sets the sail to catch the breeze,
Ferrying the legions of the dead
In bark of dusky iron-red,
Now marked with age; but heavenly powers
Have fresher, greener eld than ours.
Towards the ferry and the shore
The multitudinous phantoms pour;
Matrons, and men, and heroes dead,
And boys and maidens, yet unwed,
And youths who funeral fires have fed
Before their parent's[errata 1] eye:
Dense as the leaves that from the treen
Float down when autumn first is keen,
Or as the birds that thickly massed
Fly landward from the ocean vast,
Driven over sea by wintry blast
To seek a sunnier sky.
Each in pathetic suppliance stands,
So may he first be ferried o'er,
And stretches out his helpless hands
In yearning for the further shore:
The ferryman, austere and stern,
Takes these and those in varying turn,
