free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

The Song
Go out, young men, to the dance, and girls to your songs;
Tell and sing how love is caught.
It is caught from the eyes, it goes down to the lips,
And from the lips to the heart - takes root and will not go.
But as a rule, if British folk poetry expresses the despair of love more
surely than any other, the Greek expresses best the despair of man in
the face of the most elemental facts of life; especially death. Thus the
mantinada:
And the song:
The world’s a tree and we the produce of it,
And Charos is the reaper and takes the fruit of it.
The Lord made the earth and founded the world,
But three things only He did not make in the world –
A bridge over the sea and a return from Hades
And a ladder up to heaven.
And the mainland couplet associated with the death of the hero
Diakos in 1821:
What a time Charos has chosen to take you,
Now when the branches are blossoming and the earth putting out grass.
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