“Where frozen Scythia’s utmost bound is placed,
A desert lies, a melancholy waste:
In yellow crops there Nature never smiled,
No fruitful tree to shade the barren wild.
There sluggish cold its icy station makes,
There paleness frights, and anguish trembling shakes.
Of pining Famine this the fated seat,
To whom my orders in these words repeat:
‘Bid her this miscreant with her sharpest pains
Chastise, and sheath herself into his veins;
Be unsubdued by plenty’s baffled store,
Reject my empire, and defeat my power;
And lest the distance, and the tedious way,
Should with the toil and long fatigue dismay,
Ascend my chariot, and, convey’d on high,
Guide the rein’d dragons through the parting sky.’
The nymph, accepting of the granted car,
Sprung to the seat, and posted through the air;
Nor stopp’d till she to a bleak mountain came
Of wondrous height, and Caucasus its name.
There in a stony field the fiend she found,
Herbs gnawing, and roots scratching from the ground.
Her elf-lock hair in matted tresses grew,
Sunk were her eyes, and pale her ghastly hue;
Wan were her lips, and foul with clammy glue,
Her throat was furr’d, her entrails seen within
With snaky crawlings through her parchment skin.
Her jutting hips seem’d starting from their place,
And for a stomach’s was a belly’s space.
Her joints protuberant by leanness grown,
Consumption sunk the flesh, and raised the bone.
Her knees’ large orbits bunch’d to monstrous size,
And ankles to undue proportion rise.
This plague the nymph, not daring to draw near,
At distance hail’d, and greeted from afar;
And though she told her charge without delay,
Though her arrival late, and short her stay,
She felt keen famine, or she seem’d to feel,
Invade her blood, and on her vitals steal.
She turn’d, from the infection to remove,
And back to Thessaly the serpents drove.
The fiend obey’d the goddess’s command
(Though their effects in opposition stand),
She cut her way, supported by the wind,
And reach’d the mansion by the nymph assign’d.
’Twas night, when, entering Erisichthon’s room,
Dissolv’d in sleep, and thoughtless of his doom,
She clasp’d his limbs, by impious labour tired,
With battish wings, but her whole self inspired;
Breathed on his throat and chest a tainting blast,
And in his veins infused an endless fast.
The task despatch’d, away the fury flies
From plenteous regions, and from ripening skies;
To her old barren north she wings her speed,
And cottages distress’d with pinching need.
Still slumbers Erisichthon’s senses drown,
And sooth his fancy with their softest down.
He dreams of viands delicate to eat,
And revels on imaginary meat.
Chews with his working mouth, but chews in vain,
And tires his grinding teeth with fruitless pain;
Deludes his throat with visionary fare,
Feasts on the wind, and banquets on the air.
The morning came, the night and slumbers pass’d,
But still the furious pangs of hunger last;
The cank’rous rage still gnaws with griping pains,
Stings in his throat, and in his bowels reigns.
Straight he requires, impatient in demand,
Provisions from the air, the seas, the land.
But though the land, air, seas, provisions grant,
Starves at full tables, and complains of want.
What to a people might in dole be paid,
Or victual cities for a long blockade,
Could not one wolfish appetite assuage;
For glutting nourishment increased its rage.
As rivers pour’d from every distant shore
The sea insatiate drinks, and thirsts for more,
Or as the fire, which all materials burns,
And wasted forests into ashes turns,
Grows more voracious as the more it preys,
Recruits dilate the flame, and spread the blaze,
So impious Erisichthon’s hunger raves,
Receives refreshments, and refreshments craves.
Food raises a desire for food, and meat
Is but a new provocative to eat.
He grows more empty, as the more supplied,
And endless cramming but extends the void.