For then the labouring days had seemed to last
Longer than ever: all had been too sore,
Not to be borne as erst,—the world so vast—
Vaster than ever it had seemed before!
But, when he knew it, heavily the ire—
Darkly the sorrow of it wrought on him;
The hollows of his eyes were filled with fire;
The fruitless sweat was dried upon each limb:
Raging he went, and full of lust to kill:
O he was fillèd with a great despair;
But added labour unto labour still,
And slew her not because she was so fair.
In all of life was nothing that atoned
For that hard fate: in hearing of all heaven,
About the iron mountain world he groaned;
But no return of pitying was given.
The iron echoes in a mighty blast
Flung up his voice toward the sweet abodes
In the blue heaven: his pain was known at last
In every palace of the painless gods.
He had no part but wholly to upbraid
Them,—meters of his evil measured fate,
Who first made fair, then spoiled the thing they made,
And mingled all their gifts with love and hate.
Yet he was moved at length some way to win
Vengeance, and all at once, on her and Him—
That god with whom she rather chose to sin
Than with a man to love: when earth was dim—
Full of unearthly shadows in the night,
He came upon those lovers unaware;
And fairly caught them locked in their delight:
Limb over limb he bound them in a snare.
For first with all his craft he did invent
A curious toil of meshes, strongly set
With supple fibrous thread and branches bent:
Full tightly they were bounden in that net.
Yet, not until with many a growing gray
And change that wrought among the shifting shade,
Day—softly changing all things—warned away
Their loves and sins, knew they the fate they had.