AFTER long years of all that too sweet sin
That held her ever in the far strange land,
She felt her heart was stricken, felt begin
Great strokes of sorrow smiting like a hand.
She turned away from all the long delight
Which had so filled and blinded all the past;
The sweet sin rose up bitter in the night
And turned the love to sickness at the last.
She and her lover in their goodly halls
Gazed on each other no more the old way;
About the face of each clung shadowy palls
Of sadness all unchanged through many a day.
And now, along the fair courts marble-floored,
Each met the looks of other all aghast
With rueful thoughts unstanched yet ne’er outpoured;
And their trailed robes touched mournful as they passed.
Into the lonely paths of Ida sweet
For sorrow, dark and very sweet with leaves,
Came Helen: weary at her bosom beat
The sad thoughts all the summer noons and eves.
Strange: as her eyes sought where the sea was held
Gathered into dim distances of blue,
Down in her heart a dim Past she beheld,
Wherein were memories like an ocean too.
And strange, there, long up-pent, the memories stirred
Like waves long rolling: in her heart at length
All the fair time from which her years had erred
Came up against her now with all its strength.
Back from the earliest love-time there was sent
A tide of all the long untasted sweet
Of days forgotten, summers that were spent,
And eves when love and lover used to meet;
And heavy wafts of perfume that was known
E’en from those dark familiar laurel trees
That hid where love and lover were alone
Rolled back upon the heart with sore disease:
And from the early home there came no less
Than the reproach of each remembered gaze
Of friends, and want of all the happiness
They gave her in their simple Spartan ways.