Spear crossed with spear, dust wed with bloody dust;
Who walketh laden with such weight of wrong,
Why, let him, if he will, uplift the song
That is Hell’s triumph. But to come as I
Am now come, laden with deliverance high,
Home to a land of peace and laughing eyes,
And mar all with that fury of the skies
Which made our Greeks curse God—how should this be?
Two enemies most ancient, Fire and Sea,
A sudden friendship swore, and proved their plight
By war on us poor sailors through that night
Of misery, when the horror of the wave
Towered over us, and winds from Strymon drave
Hull against hull, till good ships, by the horn
Of the mad whirlwind gored and overborne,
One here, one there, ’mid rain and blinding spray,
Like sheep by a devil herded, passed away.
And when the blessèd Sun upraised his head,
We saw the Aegean waste a-foam with dead,
Dead men, dead ships, and spars disasterful.
Howbeit for us, our one unwounded hull
Out of that wrath was stolen or begged free
By some good spirit—sure no man was he!—
Who guided clear our helm; and on till now
Hath Saviour Fortune throned her on the prow.
No surge to mar our mooring, and no floor
Of rock to tear us when we made for shore.
Till, fled from that sea-hell, with the clear sun
Above us and all trust in fortune gone,
We drove like sheep about our brain the thoughts
Of that lost army, broken and scourged with knouts
Of evil. And, methinks, if there is breath
In them, they talk of us as gone to death—
How else?—and so say we of them! For thee,
Since Menelaus thy first care must be,
If by some word of Zeus, who wills not yet
To leave the old house for ever desolate,
Some ray of sunlight on a far-off sea
Lights him, yet green and living … we may see
His ship some day in the harbour!—’Twas the word
Of truth ye asked me for, and truth ye have heard! Exit Herald. The Chorus take position for the Third Stasimon.
Surely there was mystic meaning in the name Helena,30 meaning which was fulfilled when she fled to Troy.
Who was He who found for thee
That name, truthful utterly—
Was it One beyond our vision
Moving sure in pre-decision
Of man’s doom his mystic lips?—
Calling thee, the Battle-wed,
Thee, the Strife-encompassèd,
Helen? Yea, in fate’s derision,
Hell in cities, Hell in ships,
Hell in hearts of men they knew her,
When the dim and delicate fold
Of her curtains backward rolled,
And to sea, to sea, she threw her
In the West Wind’s giant hold;
And with spear and sword behind her
Came the hunters in a flood,
Down the oarblade’s viewless trail
Tracking, till in Simoïs’ vale
Through the leaves they crept to find her,
A Wrath, a seed of blood.
So the Name to Ilion came
On God’s thought-fulfilling flame,
She a vengeance and a token
Of the unfaith to bread broken,
Of the hearth of God betrayed,
Against them whose voices swelled
Glorying in the prize they held
And the Spoiler’s vaunt outspoken
And the song his brethren made
’Mid the bridal torches burning;
Till, behold, the ancient City
Of King Priam turned, and turning
Took a new song for her learning,
A song changed and full of pity,
With the cry of a lost nation;
And she changed the bridegroom’s name:
Called him Paris Ghastly-wed;
For her sons were with the dead,
And her life one lamentation,
’Mid blood and burning flame.
Lo, once there was a herdsman reared
In his own house, so stories tell,
A lion’s whelp, a milk-fed thing
And soft in life’s first opening
Among the sucklings of the herd;
The happy children loved him well,
And old men smiled, and oft, they say,
In men’s arms, like a babe, he lay,
Bright-eyed, and toward the hand that teased him
Eagerly fawning for food or play.
Then on a day outflashed the sudden
Rage of the lion brood of yore;
He paid his debt to them that fed
With wrack of herds and carnage red,
Yea, wrought him a great feast unbidden,
Till all the house-ways ran with gore;
A sight the thralls fled weeping from,
A great red slayer, beard a-foam,
High-priest of some blood-cursèd altar
God had uplifted against that home.
And how shall I call the thing that came
At the first hour to Ilion city?
Call it a dream of peace untold,
A secret joy in a mist of gold,
A woman’s eye that was soft, like flame,
A flower which ate a man’s heart with pity.
But she swerved aside and wrought to her kiss a bitter ending,
And a wrath was on her harbouring, a wrath upon her friending,
When to Priam and his sons she fled quickly o’er the deep,
With the god to whom she sinned for her watcher on the wind,
A death-bride, whom brides long shall weep.
A grey word liveth, from the morn
Of old time among mortals spoken,
That man’s Wealth waxen full shall fall
Not childless, but get sons withal;
And ever of great bliss is born
A tear unstanched and a heart broken.
But I hold my thought alone and by others unbeguiled;
’Tis the deed that is unholy shall have issue, child on child,
Sin on sin, like his begetters; and they shall be as they were.
But the man who walketh straight, and the house thereof, though Fate
Exalt him, the children shall be fair.
