Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/265

THE DEATH OF AGAMEMNON CHORUS. How now? What horror turns thee back again?

KASSANDRA. Faugh! faugh!

CHORUS. Why such a cry? There's something chills thy soul!

KASSANDRA. The halls breathe murder,—ay, they drip with blood.

CHORUS. How? 'T is the smell of victims at the hearth.

KASSANDRA. Nay, but the exhalation of the tomb!

CHORUS. No Syrian dainty, this, of which thou speakest.

KASSANDRA (at the portal). Yet will I in the palace wail my own

And Agamemnon's fate! Enough of life!

Alas! O friends!

Yet not for naught I quail, not as a bird

Snared in the bush: bear witness, though I die,

A woman's slaughter shall requite my own,

And, for this man ill-yoked, a man shall fall!

Thus prays of you a stranger, at death's door.

CHORUS. Lost one, I rue with thee thy foretold doom!

KASSANDRA. Once more I fain would utter words, once more,—

'T is my own threne! And I invoke the Sun, 235