HERALD. It likes me not, a day of presage high With dolorous tongue to stain. Those twain, I vow, Stand best apart. When one with shuddering brow, From armies lost, back beareth to his home Word that the terror of her prayers is come; One wound in her great heart, and many a fate For many a home of men cast out to sate The two-fold scourge that worketh Ares’ lust, Spear crossed with spear, dust wed with bloody dust; Who walketh laden with such weight of wrong, Why, let him, if he will, uplift the song That is Hell’s triumph. But to come as I Am now come, laden with deliverance high, Home to a land of peace and laughing eyes, And mar all with that fury of the skies Which made our Greeks curse God—how should this be? Two enemies most ancient, Fire and Sea, A sudden friendship swore, and proved their plight By war on us poor sailors through that night Of misery, when the horror of the wave Towered over us, and winds from Strymon drave Hull against hull, till good ships, by the horn Of the mad whirlwind gored and overborne, One here, one there, ’mid rain and blinding spray, Like sheep by a devil herded, passed away. And when the blessèd Sun upraised his head, We saw the Aegean waste a-foam with dead, Dead men, dead ships, and spars disasterful. Howbeit for us, our one unwounded hull Out of that wrath was stolen or begged free By some good spirit—sure no man was he!— Who guided clear our helm; and on till now Hath Saviour Fortune throned her on the prow. No surge to mar our mooring, and no floor Of rock to tear us when we made for shore. Till, fled from that sea-hell, with the clear sun Above us and all trust in fortune gone, We drove like sheep about our brain the thoughts Of that lost army, broken and scourged with knouts Of evil. And, methinks, if there is breath In them, they talk of us as gone to death— How else?—and so say we of them! For thee, Since Menelaüs thy first care must be, If by some word of Zeus, who wills not yet To leave the old house for ever desolate, Some ray of sunlight on a far-off sea Lights him, yet green and living … we may see His ship some day in the harbour!—’Twas the word Of truth ye asked me for, and truth ye have heard! [_Exit_ HERALD. _The_ CHORUS _take position for the Third Stasimon_.] CHORUS. (_Surely there was mystic meaning_ _in the name_ HELENA, _meaning which was fulfilled when she fled to Troy._)