But what mouth may chant again, what heart may know it,
All the rapture that all hearts of men put on
When of Salamis the time-transcending poet
Sang, whose hand had chased the Mede at Marathon?

Darker dawned the song with stormier wings above the watch-fire
spread [_Ep. 2._
Whence from Ida toward the hill of Hermes leapt the light that said
Troy was fallen, a torch funereal for the king's triumphal head.
Dire indeed the birth of Leda's womb that had God's self to sire
Bloomed, a flower of love that stung the soul with fangs that gnaw
like fire:
But the twin-born human-fathered sister-flower bore fruit more
dire.
Scarce the cry that called on airy heaven and all swift winds on
wing,
Wells of river-heads, and countless laugh of waves past reckoning,
Earth which brought forth all, and the orbed sun that looks on
everything,
Scarce that cry fills yet men's hearts more full of heart-devouring
dread
Than the murderous word said mocking, how the child whose blood he
shed
Might clasp fast and kiss her father where the dead salute the
dead.
But the latter note of anguish from the lips that mocked her lord,
When her son's hand bared against the breast that suckled him his
sword,
How might man endure, O AEschylus, to hear it and record?
How might man endure, being mortal yet, O thou most highest, to
hear?
How record, being born of woman? Surely not thy Furies near,
Surely this beheld, this only, blasted hearts to death with fear.
Not the hissing hair, nor flakes of blood that oozed from eyes of
fire,
Nor the snort of savage sleep that snuffed the hungering heart's
desire
Where the hunted prey found hardly space and harbour to respire;
She whose likeness called them--"Sleep ye, ho? what need of you
that sleep?"
(Ah, what need indeed, where she was, of all shapes that night may
keep
Hidden dark as death and deeper than men's dreams of hell are
deep?)
She the murderess of her husband, she the huntress of her son,
More than ye was she, the shadow that no God withstands but one,
Wisdom equal-eyed and stronger and more splendid than the sun.
Yea, no God ma