There stands revealed the house within,
Where the long hall retires:
The stately privacy is seen
Of Priam and his sires,
And on the threshold guards appear
In warlike pomp of shield and spear.
With tumult and confused alarms:
The deep courts wail with woman’s cries:
The clamour strikes the spangled skies.
Pale matrons run from place to place,
And clasp the doors in wild embrace.
Strong as his father, Pyrrhus strains,
Nor bar nor guard his force sustains:
The hacked door reels ’neath blow on blow,
Breaks from its hinges, and lies low.
Force wins her footing: in they rush,
The Danaan hordes, the foremost crush
And deluge with an armed tide
The spacious level far and wide.
Less fierce when, breaking from its bounds,
The water surges o’er the mounds,
Down pours it, tumbling in a heap,
O’er all the fields with headlong sweep,
And whirls before it fold and sheep.
These eyes beheld fell Pyrrhus there
Intoxicate with gore,
Beheld the curst Atridan pair
Within the sacred door,
Beheld pale Hecuba, and those
The brides her hundred children chose,
And dying Priam at the shrine
Staining the hearth he made divine.
Those fifty nuptial chambers fair,
That promised many a princely heir,
Those pillared doors in pride erect,
With gold and spoils barbaric decked,
Lie smoking on the ground: the Greek
Is potent, where the fires are weak.
He, when he sees his town o’erthrown,
Greeks bursting through his palace gate
And thronging chambers once his own,
His ancient armour, long laid by,
Around his palsied shoulders throws,
Girds with a useless sword his thigh,
And totters forth to meet his foes.
Within the mansion’s central space,
All bare and open to the day,
There stood an altar in its place,
And, close beside, an aged bay,
That drooping o’er the altar leaned,
And with its shade the home-gods screened.
Here Hecuba and all her train
Were seeking refuge, but in vain,
Huddling like doves by storms dismayed,
And clinging to the gods for aid.
But soon as Priam caught her sight,
Thus in his youthful armour dight,
‘What madness,’ cries she, ‘wretched spouse,
Has placed that helmet on your brows?
Say, whither fare you? times so dire
Bent knees, not lifted arms require:
Could Hector now before us stand,
No help were in my Hector’s hand.
Take refuge here, and learn at length
The secret of an old man’s strength:
One altar shall protect us all:
Here bide with us, or with us fall.’
She speaks, and guides his trembling feet
To join her in the hallowed seat.
Polites, one of Priam’s sons:
Through foes, through javelins, wounded sore,
He circles court and corridor,
While Pyrrhus follows in his rear
With outstretched hand and levelled spear;
Till just before his parents’ eyes,
All bathed in blood, he falls and dies.
With death in view, the unchilded sire
Checked not the utterance of his ire:
‘May Heaven, if Heaven be just to heed
Such horrors, render worthy meed,’
He cries, ‘for this atrocious deed,
Which makes me see my darling die,
And stains with blood a father’s eye.
But he to whom you feign you owe
Your birth, Achilles, ’twas not so
He dealt with Priam, though his foe:
He feared the laws of right and truth:
He heard the suppliant’s prayer with ruth,
Gave Hector’s body to the tomb,
And sent me back in safety home.’
So spoke the sire, and speaking threw
A feeble dart, no blood that drew:
The ringing metal turned it back,
And left it dangling, weak and slack.
Then Pyrrhus: ‘Take the news below,
And to my sire Achilles go:
Tell him of his degenerate seed,
And that and this my bloody deed.
Now die:’ and to the altar-stone
Along the marble floor
He dragged the father, sliddering on
E’en in his child’s own gore:
His left hand in his hair he wreathed,
While with the right he plied
His flashing sword, and hilt-deep sheathed
Within the old man’s side.
So Priam’s fortunes closed at last:
So passed he, seeing as he passed
His Troy in flames, his royal tower
Laid low in dust by hostile power,
Who once o’er lands and peoples proud
Sat, while before him Asia bowed:
Now on the shore behold him dead,
A nameless trunk, a trunkless head.
Chill horror to my bosom’s core.
I seemed my aged sire to see,
Beholding Priam, old as he,
Gasp out his life: before my eyes
Forlorn Creusa seemed to rise,
Our palace, sacked and desolate,
And young Iulus, left to fate.
Then, looking round, the place I eyed,
To see who yet were at my side.
Some by the flames were swallowed: some
Had leapt to earth: the end was come.
In Vesta’s temple crouching dark
The traitress Helen: the broad blaze
Gives me full light, as round I gaze.
She, shrinking from the Trojan’s hate
Made frantic by their city’s fate,
Nor dreading less the Danaan sword,
The vengeance of her injured lord,—
She, Troy’s and Argos’ common fiend,
Sat cowering, by the altar screened.
My blood was fired: fierce passion woke
To quit Troy’s fall by
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