"A worm fed on the heart of Corinth" I

I have been thinking, ever since February 28th, of this amazing poem by the Great War poet Isaac Rosenberg, killed in action at age 27 on April 1, 1918, near Arras. (He was a year younger than my grandfather, who survived the war.) Anyhow, this poem:

A Worm Fed on the Heart of Corinth

A worm fed on the heart of Corinth,
Babylon and Rome.
Not Paris raped tall Helen,
But this incestuous worm,
Who lured her vivid beauty
To his amorphous sleep.
England! famous as Helen
Is thy betrothal sung.
To him the shadowless,
More amorous than Solomon.

And I thought what I would like to do with it -- well, Rosenberg died on the first day of what is now National Poetry Month -- is go through it slowly, since the it's the individually haunting rhymes that come together so powerfully: the relation of sound and sense here is astonishing. So: "A worm fed on the heart of Corinth", because the Romans demolished the Greek city in 146 B.C. Somwhere, no doubt, the Biblical Corinthians is echoing, but what matters is that it's been destroyed, as have "Babylon and Rome". Not worms but A worm fed on the heart of each famous city, even Rome, the destroyer of Corinth. Babylon had been destroyed earlier, in 539 B.C., by Cyrus the Great (also killed in war about ten years later). There might be a memory of Prometheus Unbound here, of Earth's great speech to Prometheus:

Ere Babylon was dust,
The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,
Met his own image walking in the garden.

But Babylon, and Corinth, and Rome are dust now.