What’s Creüsa to Us?

(Based on David Ferry’s translation of the Aeneid, II, 692ff, in Poetry (February 2009).)

We don’t read poems nowadays to weep,
so David Ferry’s Aeneas fleeing Troy,
his father on his shoulders, charged to keep
the house-gods safe, beside his little boy,
his wife Creüsa “a little way behind”,
doesn’t yet make us cry: too many of us
have fled our native cities, staggering blind,
leaving a chaos, scorched, calamitous.

But when Aeneas panics, scurrying on
through unfamiliar streets of his own town,
Iülus clutching, Anchises weighty, heartbroken,
reaches their meeting place, and she is gone,
and cries aloud, they are his tears flow down
from our own eyes, our losses he has spoken.

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