Page:Choëphoroe (Murray 1923).djvu/33

Rh

Oh, Loxias shall not mock my great desire,

Who spoke his divine promise, charging me

To thread this peril to the extremity:

Yea, raised his awful voice and surging told

To my hot heart of horrors stormy-cold

Till I seek out those murderers, by the road

Themselves have shown—so spake he—blood for blood,

In gold-rejecting rage, the wild bull's way!

If not, for their offending I must pay

With mine own life, in torment manifold.

Of many things that rise from earth he told,

To appease the angry dead: yea, and strange forms,

On thee and me, of savage-fangèd worms,

Climbing the flesh; lichens, which eat away

Even unto nothingness our natural clay.

And when they leave him, a man's hair is white.

For him that disobeys, he said, the night

Hath Furies, shapen of his father's blood;

Clear-seen, with eyeball straining through the hood

Of darkness. The blind arrows of dead men

Who cried their kin for mercy and were slain,

And madness, and wild fear out of the night,

Shall spur him, rack him, till from all men's sight

Alone he goes, out to the desert dim,

And that bronze horror clanging after him!

For such as he there is no mixing bowl,

No dear libation that binds soul to soul:

From every altar fire the unseen rage

Outbars him: none shall give him harbourage,

Nor rest beneath one roof with such an one;