The Founder of Rome

Here is the brisker, more businesslike Dryden treatment of the same passage:

Great queen, what you command me to relate

Renews the sad remembrance of our fate:

An empire from its old foundations rent

And every woe the Trojans underwent;

A peopled city made a desert place;

All that I saw and part of which I was

Not e'en the hardest of our foes could hear,

Nor stern Ulysses tell, without a tear.

And now the latter watch of wasting night,

And setting stars to kindly rest invite.

And now the new Fagles: