THE PRAYER OF THE SWINE TO CIRCE But "the men's minds remained," and these for ever Made hungry suppliance through the fire-red eyes; Still searching aye, with impotent endeavour, A saving hope, or if they might surprise To whom with such mute speech and dumb words they appealed. What hope is ours-what hope! To find no mercy After much war, and many travails done?— Ah, kinder far than thy fell philtres, Circe, The ravening Cyclops and the Læstrigon! And O, thrice cursèd be Laertes' son, By whom, at last, we watch the days decline With no fair ending of the quest begun, Condemned in sties to weary and to pine, And with men's hearts to beat through this foul front of swine! For us not now,—for us, alas! no more By low-browed banks and reedy river places, Watch the beast hurry and the wild fowl flee; Or steering shoreward, in the upland spaces Have sight of curling smoke and fair-skinned foreign faces. Alas for us!-for whom the columned houses We left afore-time, cheerless must abide; Cheerless the hearth where now no guest carouses,— No minstrel raises song at eventide; And O, more cheerless than aught else beside, The wistful hearts with heavy longing full; The wife that watched us on the waning tide,The sire whose eyes with weariness are dull,— The mother whose slow tears fall on the carded wool. If swine we be,-if we indeed be swine, Leave us not thus with sick men's hearts to bleed!— To waste long days in yearning, dumb distress, And memory of things gone, and utter hopelessness ! Leave us at least, if not the things we were, Not hapless doomed to loathe the forms we bear, For surely cursed above all cursed are we, THE PRAYER OF THE SWINE TO CIRCE And surely this the bitterest of ill;To feel the old aspirings fair and free, Become blind motions of a powerless will Through swine-like frames dispersed to swine-like issues still. But make us men again, for that thou may'st! Yea, make us men, Enchantress, and restore These grovelling shapes, degraded and debased, To fair embodiments of men once more; Yea, by all men that ever woman bore; Yea, e'en by him hereafter born in pain, Shall draw sustainment from thy bosom's core, O'er whom thy face yet kindly shall remain, And find its like therein,-make thou us men again! Make thou us men again,-if men bul groping Foul faces to foul earth, and yearn-as we do now! So they in speech unsyllabled. But She, The fair-tressed Goddess, born to be their bane, Uplifting straight her wand of ivory, Compelled them groaning to the sties again; Where they in hopeless bitterness were fain To rend the oaken woodwork as before, And tear the troughs in impotence of pain,Not knowing, they, that even at the door Divine Odysseus stood, as Hermes told of yore. A CASE OF CAMEOS A CASE OF CAMEOS AGATE. (The Power of Love.) IRST, in an Agate-stone, a Centaur strong, FIRST, With square man-breasts and hide of dapple dun, His brown arms bound behind him with a thong, For, on his back, by some strange power of art, CHALCEDONY. (The Thefts of Mercury.) THE next in legend bade "Beware of show!” |