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TITLE: HELEN OF TROY AND OTHER POEMS
AUTHOR: SARA TEASDALE
EBOOK: E02413 (O'Briens Book Cellar)

Helen of Troy And Other Poems
By Sara Teasdale  [American (Missouri & New York) Poet]

[Note on text:  Italicized stanzas are indented 5 spaces.
Italicized words or phrases are capitalized.
Lines longer than 78 characters are broken, and the continuation
is indented two spaces.  Some obvious errors may be corrected.]

[This etext has been transcribed from the original edition,
which was published in New York in 1911.]

Helen of Troy And Other Poems

By Sara Teasdale
Author of "Sonnets to Duse, and Other Poems"

To Marion Cummings Stanley

Contents

Helen of Troy
Beatrice
Sappho
Marianna Alcoforando
Guenevere
Erinna
Love Songs
   Song
   The Rose and the Bee
   The Song Maker
   Wild Asters
   When Love Goes
   The Wayfarer
   The Princess in the Tower
   When Love Was Born
   The Shrine
   The Blind
   Love Me
   The Song for Colin
   Four Winds
   Roundel
   Dew
   A Maiden
   "I Love You"
   But Not to Me
   Hidden Love
   Snow Song
   Youth and the Pilgrim
   The Wanderer
   I Would Live in Your Love
   May
   Rispetto
   Less than the Cloud to the Wind
   Buried Love
   Song
   Pierrot
   At Night
   Song
   Love in Autumn
   The Kiss
   November
   A Song of the Princess
   The Wind
   A Winter Night
   The Metropolitan Tower
   Gramercy Park
   In the Metropolitan Museum
   Coney Island
   Union Square
   Central Park at Dusk
   Young Love
Sonnets and Lyrics
   Primavera Mia
   Soul's Birth
   Love and Death
   For the Anniversary of John Keats' Death
   Silence
   The Return
   Fear
   Anadyomene
   Galahad in the Castle of the Maidens
   To an Aeolian Harp
   To Erinna
   To Cleis
   Paris in Spring
   Madeira from the Sea
   City Vignettes
   By the Sea
   On the Death of Swinburne
   Triolets
   Vox Corporis
   A Ballad of Two Knights
   Christmas Carol
   The Faery Forest
   A Fantasy
   A Minuet of Mozart's
   Twilight
   The Prayer
   Two Songs for a Child
On the Tower

Helen of Troy and Other Poems

Helen of Troy

Wild flight on flight against the fading dawn
The flames' red wings soar upward duskily.
This is the funeral pyre and Troy is dead
That sparkled so the day I saw it first,
And darkened slowly after.  I am she
Who loves all beauty -- yet I wither it.
Why have the high gods made me wreak their wrath --
Forever since my maidenhood to sow
Sorrow and blood about me?  Lo, they keep
Their bitter care above me even now.
It was the gods who led me to this lair,
That tho' the burning winds should make me weak,
They should not snatch the life from out my lips.
Olympus let the other women die;
They shall be quiet when the day is done
And have no care to-morrow.  Yet for me
There is no rest.  The gods are not so kind
To her made half immortal like themselves.
It is to you I owe the cruel gift,
Leda, my mother, and the Swan, my sire,
To you the beauty and to you the bale;
For never woman born of man and maid
Had wrought such havoc on the earth as I,
Or troubled heaven with a sea of flame
That climbed to touch the silent whirling stars
And blotted out their brightness ere the dawn.
Have I not made the world to weep enough?
Give death to me.  Yet life is more than death;
How could I leave the sound of singing winds,
The strong sweet scent that breathes from off the sea,
Or shut my eyes forever to the spring?
I will not give the grave my hands to hold,
My shining hair to light oblivion.
Have those who wander through the ways of death,
The still wan fields Elysian, any love
To lift their breasts with longing, any lips
To thirst against the quiver of a kiss?
Lo, I shall live to conquer Greece again,
To make the people love, who hate me now.
My dreams are over, I have ceased to cry
Against the fate that made men love my mouth
And left their spirits all too deaf to hear
The little songs that echoed through my soul.
I have no anger now.  The dreams are done;
Yet since the Greeks and Trojans would not see
Aught but my body's fairness, till the end,
In all the islands set in all the seas,
And all the lands that lie beneath the sun,
Till light turn darkness, and till time shall sleep,
Men's lives shall waste with longing after me,
For I shall be the sum of their desire,
The whole of beauty, never seen again.
And they shall stretch their arms and starting, wake
With "Helen!" on their lips, and in their eyes
The vision of me.  Always I shall be
Limned on the darkness like a shaft of light
That glimmers and is gone.  They shall behold
Each one his dream that fashions me anew; --
With hair like lakes that glint beneath the stars
Dark as sweet midnight, or with hair aglow
Like burnished gold that still retains the fire.
Yea, I shall haunt until the dusk of time
The heavy eyelids filled with fleeting dreams.

I wait for one who comes with sword to slay --
The king I wronged who searches for me now;
And yet he shall not slay me.  I shall stand
With lifted head and look within his eyes,
Baring my breast to him and to the sun.
He shall not have the power to stain with blood
That whiteness -- for the thirsty sword shall fall
And he shall cry and catch me in his arms,
Bearing me back to Sparta on his breast.
Lo, I shall live to conquer Greece again!

Beatrice

Send out the singers -- let the room be still;
They have not eased my pain nor brought me sleep.
Close out the sun, for I would have it dark
That I may feel how black the grave will be.
The sun is setting, for the light is red,
And you are outlined in a golden fire,
Like Ursula upon an altar-screen.
Come, leave the light and sit beside my bed,
For I have had enough of saints and prayers.
Strange broken thoughts are beating in my brain,
They come and vanish and again they come.
It is the fever driving out my soul,
And Death stands waiting by the arras there.

Ornella, I will speak, for soon my lips

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