Forgotten brooch and shrivelled scar,

Were these the only guarantee

This was Odysseus? Did she go

Through twenty years of drifting snow,

Whitening that head and hers, to be

Near as a wife, and yet so far?

The brooch came closer as he told—

Grown suddenly young—how he had lost

The wild doe and the raging hound

That battled in the golden round.

She listened, but what shook her most

Was that these creatures made her old.

Odysseus and that idle tale—

How many things in her had died

While hound and doe shut in the nng

Still fought somewhere in the world, a thing

So strange, her heart knocked on her side.

His eyes with time were bleached and pale.

A stranger, who had seen too much,

Been where she could not follow, sealed

In blank and smooth estranging snow

From head to foot. How could she know

What a brown scar said or concealed?

Yet now she trembled at his touch.