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Home  »  A Library of American Literature  »  Andromeda

Stedman and Hutchinson, comps. A Library of American Literature:
An Anthology in Eleven Volumes. 1891.
Vols. IX–XI: Literature of the Republic, Part IV., 1861–1889

Andromeda

By James Jeffrey Roche (1847–1908)

[Born in Mountmellick, Queen’s Co., Ireland, 1847. Died in Berne, Switzerland, 1908. From Songs and Satires. 1887.]

THEY chained her fair young body to the cold and cruel stone;

The beast begot of sea and slime had marked her for his own;

The callous world beheld the wrong, and left her there alone.

Base caitiffs who belied her, false kinsmen who denied her,

Ye left her there alone!

My Beautiful, they left thee in thy peril and thy pain;

The night that hath no morrow was brooding on the main:

But lo! a light is breaking of hope for thee again;

’Tis Perseus’ sword a-flaming, thy dawn of day proclaiming

Across the western main.

O Ireland! O my country! he comes to break thy chain!