Helen Redeemed and Other Poems
And her need. Never must she call in vain.

Now takes he way alone over the plain

Where dark yet hovers like a catafalque

And all life swoons, and only dead thing walk,

Uneasy sprites denied a resting space,

That shudder as they flit from place to place,

Like bats of flaggy wing that make night blink

With endless quest: so do those dead, men think,

Who fall and are unserved by funeral rite.

These passes he, and nears the walls of might

Which Godhead built for proud Laomedon,

And knows the house of Paris built thereon,

Terraced and set with gadding vines and trees

And ever falling water, for the ease

Of that sweet indweller he held in store.

Thither he turns him quaking, but before

Him dares not look, lest he should see her there

Aglimmer through the dusk and, unaware,

Discover her fill some mere homely part

Intolerably familiar to his heart,


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