Eight Harvard Poets/Helen

HELEN

AGAIN the voices of the hunting horns
And the new moon, low lying on the hills,
Tell that the summer night is on its way.—
O languid heart, shalt thou much longer watch
This pale procession of the silent hours
Melt into shadows of unending years?
Much longer feed on yearning and despair
And all the anguish of departed time?
Tomorrow is as yesterday; today
No nearer than the morning when there stood
In Leda's palace, asking for my hand,
Tall Menelaus with his yellow hair;
No nearer now than the first time these hands
Dared linger in caress upon the curls
Of him whose dark eyes laughed their love to mine.
'Tis only as if one short, restless sleep
Lay over the wide chasm of the years
Beyond which loom lost faith and ruined Troy.
The night wind brings, as twenty summers since,
The silver-breasted swallows from the Nile
To quiet Sparta, nestled in her hills,
Locked inland from the voices of the sea;
And far across the porticos I hear
The ivory shuttle singing in the loom

'Midst maidens' chatter, as in olden days;
And men still murmur as they pass me by:
"Lo, look on her, the wonder of the world,
Beauteous Helen, Lacedaemon's Queen!"
I watch them gaze intently on my face
As they would keep it in their memory
Forever, and the very while they gaze
I see the flame of Troy gleam in their eyes.

I think sometimes I have already passed
Into the kingdom of untroubled death,
And wandering lonely amongst them I knew
In Hellas or that land beyond the seas,
Behold each shadow as it passes by
Shrink half involuntarily, and turn,
And veil its face and vanish in the gloom.
Whilst out of that dim distance whence my steps
Are moving and to which they shall return
After an interval of endless years,
There comes a voice that calls me from afar:
"Art thou not Helen, dowered of the gods
With all that man can covet? Wert thou not
Created the most beautiful of earth,
And is not beauty wisdom, wisdom power?
What hast thou done with their almighty gift?"
And then, ere I would answer, silence falls
Around me, and the dark divides, and I
See the blue twilight on the Spartan hills.