Atlantis Poems!

Hello everyone – 

I’ve been reading and reflecting lately about the legend of lost Atlantis – the sunken city or land that, according to Plato, was destroyed in prehistoric times by a catastrophic deluge and that now lies at the bottom of the sea. Where, exactly, this great prehistoric city and civilization were located remains a mystery. Many scholars – starting with Aristotle – have argued that Atlantis is a parable told by Plato, intended as a cautionary tale against overweening pride, imperialism, etc. But other scholars and adventurers have been searching the Seven Seas for a drowned city since the Age of Exploration, and many intriguing possibilities for Atlantis’ location have been theorized. Two theories that seem to hold the most water (intentional pun!), at least in my opinion, would place the lost city beneath the North Sea, off the eastern coast of Britain, where scientific studies have confirmed the existence of a lost Mesolithic and Neolithic civilization in areas of Europe that were once above sea level but were later drowned by the waves due to climate change after the end of the last Ice Age. Another possibility that has caught my attention is the hypothesis that Atlantis might have once existed in a now drowned region of Indonesia, where evidence of early agriculture and a land bridge that once connected Southeast Asia and Australia are well attested.

Whether or not Atlantis truly existed in a real, historical sense, the story of the lost city and civilization serves to remind us that (in the immortal words of Heraclitus) “nothing is permanent except change.” In memory of lost Atlantis, and in honor of all those who have dreamed of and searched for it, here is a trio of poems to help us remember the lessons that Plato intended to teach us through his perennial tale of climate change from the prehistoric past.

 

“The City in the Sea”

By Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

 

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne

In a strange city lying alone

Far down within the dim West,

Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best

Have gone to their eternal rest.

There shrines and palaces and towers

(Time-eaten towers and tremble not!)

Resemble nothing that is ours.

Around, by lifting winds forgot,

Resignedly beneath the sky

The melancholy waters lie.

 

No rays from the holy Heaven come down

On the long night-time of that town;

But light from out the lurid sea

Streams up the turrets silently—

Gleams up the pinnacles far and free—

Up domes—up spires—up kingly halls—

Up fanes—up Babylon-like walls—

Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers

Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers—

Up many and many a marvelous shrine

Whose wreathed friezes intertwine

The viol, the violet, and the vine.

Resignedly beneath the sky

The melancholy waters lie.

So blend the turrets and shadows there

That all seem pendulous in air,

While from a proud tower in the town

Death looks gigantically down.

 

There open fanes and gaping graves

Yawn level with the luminous waves;

But not the riches there that lie

In each idol’s diamond eye—

Not the gaily-jeweled dead

Tempt the waters from their bed;

For no ripples curl, alas!

Along that wilderness of glass—

No swellings tell that winds may be

Upon some far-off happier sea—

No heavings hint that winds have been

On seas less hideously serene.

 

But lo, a stir is in the air!

The wave—there is a movement there!

As if the towers had thrust aside,

In slightly sinking, the dull tide—

As if their tops had feebly given

A void within the filmy Heaven.

The waves have now a redder glow—

The hours are breathing faint and low—

And when, amid no earthly moans,

Down, down that town shall settle hence,

Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,

Shall do it reverence.

 

“The Lost Land”

By Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919)

 

There is a story of a beauteous land,

Where fields were fertile and where flowers were bright;

Where tall towers glistened in the morning light,

Where happy children wandered hand in hand,

Where lovers wrote their names upon the sand.

They say it vanished from all human sight,

The hungry sea devoured it in a night.

 

You doubt the tale? ah, you will understand;

For, as men muse upon that fable old,

They give sad credence always at the last,

However they have caviled at its truth,

When with a tear-dimmed vision they behold,

Swift sinking in the ocean of the Past,

The lovely lost Atlantis of their Youth.

 

“The City”

By H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937)

 

It was golden and splendid,

That City of light;

A vision suspended

In deeps of the night;

A region of wonder and glory, whose temples were marble and white.

 

I remember the season

It dawned on my gaze;

The mad time of unreason,

The brain-numbing days

When Winter, white-sheeted and ghastly, stalks onward to torture and craze.

 

More lovely than Zion

It shone in the sky,

When the beams of Orion

Beclouded my eye,

Bringing sleep that was filled with dim memories of moments obscure and gone by.

 

Its mansions were stately

With carvings made fair,

Each rising sedately

On terraces rare,

And the gardens were fragrant and bright with strange miracles blossoming there.

 

The avenues lured me

With vistas sublime;

Tall arches assured me

That once on a time

I had wandered in rapture beneath them, and basked in the Halcyon clime.

 

On the plazas were standing

A sculptured array;

Long-bearded, commanding,

Grave men in their day—

But one stood dismantled and broken, its bearded face battered away.

 

In that city effulgent

No mortal I saw;

But my fancy, indulgent

To memory’s law,

Lingered long on the forms in the plazas, and eyed their stone features with awe.

 

I fanned the faint ember

That glowed in my mind,

And strove to remember

The aeons behind;

To rove thro’ infinity freely, and visit the past unconfined.

 

Then the horrible warning

Upon my soul sped

Like the ominous morning

That rises in red,

And in panic I flew from the knowledge of terrors forgotten and dead.

 

A fragment from an otherwise lost work by the Greek historian Hellanicus of Lesbos (fl. 5^th century BCE), which contains the earliest known literary reference to Atlantis – which was published a generation or so before Plato’s Atlantis dialogues, the Timaeus and the Critias. (Image Credit: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons)

Until next time –

Rob