Page:Homer - Iliad, translation Pope, 1909.djvu/404

402 She faints, or but recovers to complain:

"O wretched husband of a wretched wife!

Born with one fate to one unhappy life!

For sure one star its baneful beam displayed

On Priam's roof and Hippoplacia's shade.

From different parents, different climes, we came,

At different periods, yet our fate the same!

Why was my birth to great Eetion owed,

And why was all that tender care bestowed?

Would I had never been!—O thou, the ghost

Of my dead husband! miserably lost!

Thou to the dismal realms for ever gone!

And I abandoned, desolate, alone!

An only child, once comfort of my pains,

Sad product now of hapless love, remains!

No more to smile upon his sire! no friend

To help him now! no father to defend!

For should he 'scape the sword, the common doom,

What wrongs attend him, and what griefs to come!

E'en from his own paternal roof expelled,

Some stranger ploughs his patrimonial field.

The day that to the shades the father sends,

Robs the sad orphan of his father's friends:

He, wretched outcast of mankind! appears

For ever sad, for ever bathed In tears;

Amongst the happy, unregarded he

Hangs on the robe or trembles at the knee;

While those his father's former bounty fed,

Nor reach the goblet, nor divide the bread:

The kindest but his present wants allay,

To leave him wretched the succeeding day.

Frugal compassion! Heedless they who boast

Both parents still, nor feel what he has lost,

Shall cry, Begone! thy father feasts not here:

The wretch obeys, retiring with a tear.

Thus wretched, thus retiring all In tears,

To my sad soul Astyanax appears!

Forced by repeated insults to return,

And to his widowed mother vainly mourn.

He who, with tender delicacy bred,

With princes sported, and on dainties fed,

And, when still evening gave him up to rest,

Sunk soft in down upon the nurse's breast,

Must—ah what must he not? Whom Ilion calls

Astyanax, from her well-guarded walls,

Is now that name no more, unhappy boy!

Since now no more thy father guards his Troy.

But thou, my Hector! liest exposed in air,

Far from thy parents' and thy consort's care,