I.
He all that time among the sewers of Troy
Scouring for scraps. A man so venerable
He might have been Priam’s self, but Priam was dead,
Troy taken. His arms grew meagre as a boy’s,
And all that flourished in that hollow famine
Was his long, white, round beard. Oh, sturdily
He swung his staff and sent the bold rats skipping
Across the scurfy hills and worm-wet valleys,
Crying: “Achilles, Ajax, turn and fight!
Stop, cowards!” Till his cries, dazed and confounded,
Flew back at him with: “Coward, turn and fight!”
And the wild Greeks yelled round him.
Yet he withstood them, a brave, mad old man,
And fought the rats for Troy. The light was rat-grey,
The hills and dells, the common drain, his Simois,
Rat-grey. Mysterious shadows fell
Affrighting him whenever a cloud offended
The sun up in the other world. The rat-hordes,
Moving, were grey dust shifting in grey dust.
Proud history has such sackends. He was taken
At last by some chance robber seeking treasure
Under Troy’s riven roots. Dragged to the surface.
And there he saw Troy like a burial ground
With tumbled walls for tombs, the smooth sward wrinkled
As Time’s last wave had long since passed that way,
The sky, the sea, Mount Ida and the islands,
No sail from edge to edge, the Greeks clean gone.
They stretched him on a rock and wrenched his limbs,
Asking: “Where is the treasure?” till he died.
II.
I’ve often wandered in the fields of Troy
Beneath the walls, seen Paris as a boy
Before youth made him vicious. Hector’s smile
And untried lion-look can still beguile
My heart of peace. That was before the fall,
When high still stood Troy’s many-tunnelled wall.
Now I am shackled to a Grecian dolt,
Pragmatic, race-proud as a pampered colt.
All here is strange to me, the country kings,
This cold aspiring race, the mountain-rings
On every side. They are like toppling snow-wreaths
Heaped on Troy’s hearth. Yet still an ember breathes
Below to breed its crop of yearly ills,
The flowering trees on the unreal hills.
These bring Troy back. And when along the stone
The lizard flickers, thirty years I’m thrown
At odds and stand again where once I stood,
And see Troy’s towers burn like a winter wood.
For then into their country all in flame,
From their uncounted caves the lizards came
And looked and melted in a glaze of fire,
While all the wall rustled and sang with ire
As heat ate all. I saw calamity
In action there, and it will always be
Before me in the lizard on the stone.
But in my heart a deeper spite has grown,
This, that they would not arm us, and preferred
Troy’s ruin lest a slave should snatch a sword
And fight even at their side. Yet in that fall
They lost no more than we who lost our all.
Troy was our breath, our soul, and all our wit,
Who did not own it but were owned by it.
We must have fought for Troy. We were its hands,
And not like them mere houses, flocks, and lands.
We were the Trojans; they at best could swell
A pompous or a bloody spectacle.
And so we watched with dogs outside the ring
Heroes fall cheap as meat, king slaughtering king
Like fatted cattle. Yet they did not guess
How our thoughts wantoned with their wantonness.
They were too high for that; they guessed too late,
When full had grown our knowledge and our hate.
And then they thought, with arms as strong as theirs,
We too might make a din with swords and spears,
And while they feared the Greeks they feared us most,
And ancient Troy was lost and we were lost.
Now an old man—why should that one regret,
When all else has grown tranquil, shake me yet?
Of all my life I know one thing, I know,
Before I was a slave, long, long ago,
I lost a sword in a forgotten fight,
And ever since my arm has been too light
For this dense world, and shall grow lighter still.
Yet through that rage shines Troy’s untroubled hill,
And many a tumbled wall and vanished tree
Remains, as if in spite, a happy memory.