Helen of Troy | Page 3

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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