An Epic of Women and Other Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

After long years of all that too sweet sin
That held her ever in the far strange land,
She felt her heart was stricken, felt begin
Great strokes of sorrow smiting like a hand.

She turned away from all the long delight
Which had so filled and blinded all the past;
The sweet sin rose up bitter in the night
And turned the love to sickness at the last.

She and her lover in their goodly halls
Gazed on each other no more the old way;
About the face of each clung shadowy palls
Of sadness all unchanged through many a day.

134

And now, along the fair courts marble-floored,
Each met the looks of other all aghast
With rueful thoughts unstanched yet ne'er outpoured;
And their trailed robes touched mournful as they passed.

Into the lonely paths of Ida sweet
For sorrow, dark and very sweet with leaves,
Came Helen: weary at her bosom beat
The sad thoughts all the summer noons and eves.

Strange: as her eyes sought where the sea was held
Gathered into dim distances of blue,
Down in her heart a dim Past she beheld,
Wherein were memories like an ocean too.

And strange, there, long up-pent, the memories stirred
Like waves long rolling: in her heart at length
All the fair time from which her years had erred
Came up against her now with all its strength.

135

Back from the earliest love-time there was sent
A tide of all the long untasted sweet
Of days forgotten, summers that were spent,
And eves when love and lover used to meet;

And heavy wafts of perfume that was known
E'en from those dark familiar laurel trees
That hid where love and lover were alone
Rolled back upon the heart with sore disease:

And from the early home there came no less
Than the reproach of each remembered gaze
Of friends, and want of all the happiness
They gave her in their simple Spartan ways.

And now her heart strove, longing, to divine
The several thoughts of her they had devised
In separate years that passed by with no sign;
Yea, to have known their pain she would have prized:

For now when toward them her heart was wrought
Quite weak, and from no tenderness forbore,
They seemed all strong against her, with hard thought
And faces turning from her evermore.

136

And with the vision of them so deceived
Came piteous memories of the waning face
Of the Old man who sat all shamed and grieved
Lonely beside the hearth's familiar place.

Before her soon in very semblance gleamed
The Spartan homestead there unaltered, plain,
With all the household things; yea, till she dreamed
All were yet to begin that way again,

And Menelaus the next golden morn
Were still to come for her with wedlock blest,
As though not all deserted and forlorn
He strayed—the lone man without love or rest.

But most she yearned between her fear and love,
To see him now—divining what was due
To wrath and sorrowing to change and move
His features from the fashion that she knew:

For now the first time after all those years
The face seemed anyhow her way to seek;
—But turned upon her now with all its tears
And vengeance of reproach at length to wreak;

137

—And seemed to hold her through her love come back,
Unforeseen, and how come, she could not tell;
So that the wrath of it, the grief could rack
Her heart,—yet her heart craved therewith to dwell.

He was her husband—it should ever seem;
And that home, surely it was still her home;
And years since some long voyage or a dream;
And now no more the heart was fain to roam:

Nay, but was true to where it felt begin
Love and the rosy ecstasies so brief;
And that was surely love and the rest sin,
That all delight and all the other grief.

And now though none should render her heart's right
In any fair place where she used to sit,
She would have prayed for a mere alien's sight
Of all it was so little pain to quit:

138

Just to draw near, some silent hour, alone,
Unheralded, unwelcomed, and behold
Her husband and remember him her own,
And be quite near him only as of old:

And perchance, for some grief that was exprest
Plainly upon his face, she might have dared
To enter in, and after all been blest
Some remnant of his pity to have shared.

—Alas, too surely, for long years, all thought
And love of her had perished from his heart;
Until on all her memory were wrought
Dishonour, and with him she had no part;

—And this the while, so held of alien joys,
She spared no thought for him and for his pain,
Nor fancied the least echo of his voice
Sent forth a thousand times to her in vain;

When, might-be many a time, his earnest grief
Sent it so truly seeking her quite near,
Vainly it fell on some dumb flower or leaf
Beside her, never cherished in her ear.

And she thought how one day—she heeding nought—
The last voice on the fruitless air was borne
And died almost a taunt, and the last thought
Of her was changed to hate or utter scorn.

139

And she thought how since that time, day by day,
The man had learnt to live without her need,
And been quite happy perhaps many a way,
All without loving her or taking heed.

And that which was the great woe had scarce grown
In any gradual way; but with a burst
Her life was torn apart from peace, and thrown
Far from the love that seemed its own at first

All for a mere girl's fancy too—a whim
For foreign faces and some ruddier south,
And no real choice to die away from him
Who won the truest troth in love and youth.

Now it was bitter to be quite outcast,
And bitter—when this thought of dying crost
Her heart—to reach him no more at the last
Than in mere rumour, as of one long lost.

140

She looked upon the great sea rolled between
Herself and Lacedæmon: but the Past,
The sins and all the falseness that had been
Seemed like an ocean deeper and more vast.