It is to you I owe the cruel gift,
Leda, my mother, and the Swan, my sire,
To you the beauty and to you the bale;
For never woman born of man and maid
Had wrought such havoc on the earth as I,
Or troubled heaven with a sea of flame
That climbed to touch the silent whirling stars
And blotted out their brightness ere the dawn.
Leda, my mother, and the Swan, my sire,
To you the beauty and to you the bale;
For never woman born of man and maid
Had wrought such havoc on the earth as I,
Or troubled heaven with a sea of flame
That climbed to touch the silent whirling stars
And blotted out their brightness ere the dawn.
Sara Teasdale
For Gwenette.
[Note on text: Italicized stanzas are indented 5 spaces. Italicized
words or phrases are capitalized. Lines longer than 78 characters are
broken, and the continuation is indented two spaces. Some obvious
errors may be corrected. ]
[This etext has been transcribed from the original edition, which was
published in New York in 1911. ]
Helen of Troy And Other Poems
By
Sara Teasdale
[American (Missouri & New York) Poet]
Author of "Sonnets to Duse, and Other Poems"
To Marion Cummings Stanley
Contents
Helen of Troy
Beatrice
Sappho
Marianna Alcoforando
Guenevere
Erinna
Love Songs
Song
The Rose and the Bee
The Song Maker
Wild Asters
When Love Goes
The Wayfarer
The Princess in the Tower
When Love Was Born
The Shrine
The Blind
Love Me
The Song for Colin
Four Winds
Roundel
Dew
A Maiden
"I Love You"
But Not to Me
Hidden Love
Snow Song
Youth and the Pilgrim
The Wanderer
I Would Live in Your Love
May
Rispetto
Less than the Cloud to the Wind
Buried Love
Song
Pierrot
At Night
Song
Love in Autumn
The Kiss
November
A Song of the Princess
The Wind
A Winter Night
The Metropolitan Tower
Gramercy Park
In the Metropolitan Museum
Coney Island
Union Square
Central Park at Dusk
Young Love
Sonnets and Lyrics
Primavera Mia
Soul's Birth
Love and Death
For the Anniversary of John Keats' Death
Silence
The Return
Fear
Anadyomene
Galahad in the Castle of the Maidens
To an Aeolian Harp
To Erinna
To Cleis
Paris in Spring
Madeira from the Sea
City Vignettes
By the Sea
On the Death of Swinburne
Triolets
Vox Corporis
A Ballad of Two Knights
Christmas Carol
The Faery Forest
A Fantasy
A Minuet of Mozart's
Twilight
The Prayer
Two Songs for a Child
On the Tower
Helen of Troy and Other Poems
Helen of Troy
Wild flight on flight against the fading dawn
The flames' red wings soar upward duskily.
This is the funeral pyre and Troy is dead
That sparkled so the day I saw it first,
And darkened slowly after. I am she
Who loves all beauty--yet I wither it.
Why have the high gods made me wreak their wrath--
Forever since my maidenhood to sow
Sorrow and blood about me? Lo, they keep
Their bitter care above me even now.
It was the gods who led me to this lair,
That tho' the burning winds should make me weak,
They should not snatch the life from out my lips.
Olympus let the other women die;
They shall be quiet when the day is done
And have no care to-morrow. Yet for me
There is no rest. The gods are not so kind
To her made half immortal like themselves.
It is to you I owe the cruel gift,
Leda, my mother, and the Swan, my sire,
To you the beauty and to you the bale;
For never woman born of man and maid
Had wrought such havoc on the earth as I,
Or troubled heaven with a sea of flame
That climbed to touch the silent whirling stars
And blotted out their brightness ere the dawn.
Have I not made the world to weep enough?
Give death to me. Yet life is more than death;
How could I leave the sound of singing winds,
The strong sweet scent that breathes from off the sea,
Or shut my eyes forever to the spring?
I will not give the grave my hands to hold,
My shining hair to light oblivion.
Have those who wander through the ways of death,
The still wan fields Elysian, any love
To lift their breasts with longing, any lips
To thirst against the quiver of a kiss?
Lo, I shall live to conquer Greece again,
To make the people love, who hate me now.
My dreams are over, I have ceased to cry
Against the fate that made men love my mouth
And left their spirits all too deaf to hear
The little songs that echoed through my soul.
I have no anger now. The dreams are done;
Yet since the Greeks and Trojans would not see
Aught but my body's fairness, till the end,
In all the islands set in all the seas,
And all the lands that lie beneath the sun,
Till light turn darkness, and till time shall sleep,
Men's lives shall waste with longing after me,
For I shall be the sum of their desire,
The whole of beauty, never seen again.
And they shall stretch their arms and starting, wake
With "Helen! " on their lips, and in their eyes
The vision of me. Always I shall be
Limned on the darkness like a shaft of light
That glimmers and is gone. They shall behold
Each one his dream that fashions me anew;--
With hair like lakes that glint beneath the stars
Dark as sweet midnight, or with hair aglow
Like burnished gold that still retains the fire.
Yea, I shall haunt until the dusk of time
The heavy eyelids filled with fleeting dreams.
I wait for one who comes with sword to slay--
The king I wronged who searches for me now;
And yet he shall not slay me.
[Note on text: Italicized stanzas are indented 5 spaces. Italicized
words or phrases are capitalized. Lines longer than 78 characters are
broken, and the continuation is indented two spaces. Some obvious
errors may be corrected. ]
[This etext has been transcribed from the original edition, which was
published in New York in 1911. ]
Helen of Troy And Other Poems
By
Sara Teasdale
[American (Missouri & New York) Poet]
Author of "Sonnets to Duse, and Other Poems"
To Marion Cummings Stanley
Contents
Helen of Troy
Beatrice
Sappho
Marianna Alcoforando
Guenevere
Erinna
Love Songs
Song
The Rose and the Bee
The Song Maker
Wild Asters
When Love Goes
The Wayfarer
The Princess in the Tower
When Love Was Born
The Shrine
The Blind
Love Me
The Song for Colin
Four Winds
Roundel
Dew
A Maiden
"I Love You"
But Not to Me
Hidden Love
Snow Song
Youth and the Pilgrim
The Wanderer
I Would Live in Your Love
May
Rispetto
Less than the Cloud to the Wind
Buried Love
Song
Pierrot
At Night
Song
Love in Autumn
The Kiss
November
A Song of the Princess
The Wind
A Winter Night
The Metropolitan Tower
Gramercy Park
In the Metropolitan Museum
Coney Island
Union Square
Central Park at Dusk
Young Love
Sonnets and Lyrics
Primavera Mia
Soul's Birth
Love and Death
For the Anniversary of John Keats' Death
Silence
The Return
Fear
Anadyomene
Galahad in the Castle of the Maidens
To an Aeolian Harp
To Erinna
To Cleis
Paris in Spring
Madeira from the Sea
City Vignettes
By the Sea
On the Death of Swinburne
Triolets
Vox Corporis
A Ballad of Two Knights
Christmas Carol
The Faery Forest
A Fantasy
A Minuet of Mozart's
Twilight
The Prayer
Two Songs for a Child
On the Tower
Helen of Troy and Other Poems
Helen of Troy
Wild flight on flight against the fading dawn
The flames' red wings soar upward duskily.
This is the funeral pyre and Troy is dead
That sparkled so the day I saw it first,
And darkened slowly after. I am she
Who loves all beauty--yet I wither it.
Why have the high gods made me wreak their wrath--
Forever since my maidenhood to sow
Sorrow and blood about me? Lo, they keep
Their bitter care above me even now.
It was the gods who led me to this lair,
That tho' the burning winds should make me weak,
They should not snatch the life from out my lips.
Olympus let the other women die;
They shall be quiet when the day is done
And have no care to-morrow. Yet for me
There is no rest. The gods are not so kind
To her made half immortal like themselves.
It is to you I owe the cruel gift,
Leda, my mother, and the Swan, my sire,
To you the beauty and to you the bale;
For never woman born of man and maid
Had wrought such havoc on the earth as I,
Or troubled heaven with a sea of flame
That climbed to touch the silent whirling stars
And blotted out their brightness ere the dawn.
Have I not made the world to weep enough?
Give death to me. Yet life is more than death;
How could I leave the sound of singing winds,
The strong sweet scent that breathes from off the sea,
Or shut my eyes forever to the spring?
I will not give the grave my hands to hold,
My shining hair to light oblivion.
Have those who wander through the ways of death,
The still wan fields Elysian, any love
To lift their breasts with longing, any lips
To thirst against the quiver of a kiss?
Lo, I shall live to conquer Greece again,
To make the people love, who hate me now.
My dreams are over, I have ceased to cry
Against the fate that made men love my mouth
And left their spirits all too deaf to hear
The little songs that echoed through my soul.
I have no anger now. The dreams are done;
Yet since the Greeks and Trojans would not see
Aught but my body's fairness, till the end,
In all the islands set in all the seas,
And all the lands that lie beneath the sun,
Till light turn darkness, and till time shall sleep,
Men's lives shall waste with longing after me,
For I shall be the sum of their desire,
The whole of beauty, never seen again.
And they shall stretch their arms and starting, wake
With "Helen! " on their lips, and in their eyes
The vision of me. Always I shall be
Limned on the darkness like a shaft of light
That glimmers and is gone. They shall behold
Each one his dream that fashions me anew;--
With hair like lakes that glint beneath the stars
Dark as sweet midnight, or with hair aglow
Like burnished gold that still retains the fire.
Yea, I shall haunt until the dusk of time
The heavy eyelids filled with fleeting dreams.
I wait for one who comes with sword to slay--
The king I wronged who searches for me now;
And yet he shall not slay me.
