Force is its prevailing character- a force,
however, consisting more in a well ordered and sonorous arrangement of
this metre, and a judicious disposal of what may be called the
circumstances of the poem, than in the true material of lyric vigor.
We are introduced, first, to the Turk who dreams, at midnight, in
his guarded tent,
of the hour
When Greece her knee in suppliance bent,
Should tremble at his power-
He is represented as revelling in the visions of ambition.
In dreams through camp and court he bore
The trophies of a conqueror;
In dreams his song of triumph heard;
Then wore his monarch's signet ring;
Then pressed that monarch's throne- a king;
As wild his thoughts and gay of wing
As Eden's garden bird.
In direct contrast to this we have Bozzaris watchful in the
forest, and ranging his band of Suliotes on the ground, and amid the
memories of Plataea. An hour elapses, and the Turk awakes from his
visions of false glory- to die. But Bozzaris dies- to awake. He dies
in the flush of victory to awake, in death, to an ultimate certainty
of Freedom. Then follows an invocation to death. His terrors under
ordinary circumstances are contrasted with the glories of the
dissolution of Bozzaris, in which the approach of the Destroyer is
welcome as the cry
That told the Indian isles were nigh
To the world-seeking Genoese,
When the land-wind from woods of palm,
And orange groves and fields of balm,
Blew o'er the Haytian seas.
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