The veteran Greeks came home
Sleep wandering from the war.
We saw the galleys come
Blundering over the bar.
Each soldier with his scar
In rags and tatters came home.
Reading the wall of Troy
Ten years without a change
Was such intense employ
(Just out of the arrows’ range),
All the world was strange
After ten years of Troy.
Their eyes knew every stone
In the huge heartbreaking wall
Year after year grown
Till there was nothing at all
But an alley steep and small,
Tramped earth and towering stone.
Now even the hills seemed low
In the boundless sea and land,
Weakened by distance so.
How could they understand
Space empty on every hand
And the hillocks squat and low?
And when they arrived at last
They found a childish scene
Embosomed in the past,
And the war lying between—
A child’s preoccupied scene
When they came home at last.
But everything trite and strange,
The peace, the parcelled ground,
The vinerows—never a change!
The past and the present bo-ind
In one oblivious round
Past thinking trite and strange.
But for their grey-haired wives
And their sons grown shy and tall
They would have given their lives
To raise the battered wall
Again, if this was all
In spite of their sons and wives.
Penelope in her tower
Looked down upon the show
And saw within an hour
Each man to his wife go,
Hesitant, sure and slow:
She, alone in her tower.