Page:Prometheus Bound, and other poems.djvu/49

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I have more leisure than I covet, here.

Chorus. If thou canst tell us aught that's left untold

Or loosely told of her most dreary flight,

Declare it straight! but if thou hast uttered all,

Grant us that latter grace for which we prayed,

Remembering how we prayed it.

Prometheus. She has heard

The fullness of the wandering of her woe—

But that she may have knowledge not to have heard

All vainly, I will tell what she endured,

Ere coming hither, and invoke the past

To prove my prescience true. And so—to leave

All crowd of jostling words, and pass at once

To the first step of thy course—when thou hadst gone

To those Molossian plains which sweep around

Dodona shouldering Heaven, whereat the fane

Of Zeus Thesprotian keepeth oracle,—

And, wonder past belief, the oaks do wave

Articulate adjurations—ay, and they

Did so salute thee in no phrase perplexed,

But clear with glory, noble wife of Zeus

Who shouldst be—(Here some sweetness took thy sense!)

Thou didst rush further onward,—stung along

The ocean-shore,—toward Rhea's mighty bay,—

And, tost back from it, wert tost to it again

In stormy evolution!—and, know well,

In coming time that hollow of the sea

Shall bear the name Ionian, and present

A monument of Io's passage through,

Unto all mortals. These words be the signs