Trusting in him, the sons of Atreus stayed Awhile the war, and unto Lemnos, land Of stately mansions, sent they Tydeus' son And battle-staunch Odysseus oversea. Fast by the Fire-god's city sped they on Over the broad flood of the Aegean Sea To vine-clad Lemnos, where in far-off days The wives wreaked murderous vengeance on their lords, In fierce wrath that they gave them not their due, But couched beside the handmaid-thralls of Thrace, The captives of their spears when they laid waste The land of warrior Thracians. Then these wives, Their hearts with fiery jealousy's fever filled, Murdered in every home with merciless hands Their husbands: no compassion would they show To their own wedded lords--such madness shakes The heart of man or woman, when it burns With jealousy's fever, stung by torturing pangs. So with souls filled with desperate hardihood In one night did they slaughter all their lords; And on a widowed nation rose the sun. To hallowed Lemnos came those heroes twain; They marked the rocky cave where lay the son Of princely Poeas. Horror came on them When they beheld the hero of their quest Groaning with bitter pangs, on the hard earth Lying, with many feathers round him strewn, And others round his body, rudely sewn Into a cloak, a screen from winter's cold. For, oft as famine stung him, would he shoot The shaft that missed no fowl his aim had doomed. Their flesh he ate, their feathers vestured him. And there lay herbs and healing leaves, the which, Spread on his deadly wound, assuaged its pangs. Wild tangled elf-locks hung about his head. He seemed a wild beast, that hath set its foot, Prowling by night, upon a hidden trap, And so hath been constrained in agony To bite with fierce teeth through the prisoned limb Ere it could win back to its cave, and there In hunger and torturing pains it languisheth. So in that wide cave suffering crushed the man; And all his frame was wasted: naught but skin Covered his bones. Unwashen there he crouched With famine-haggard cheeks, with sunken eyes Glaring his misery 'neath cavernous brows. Never his groaning ceased, for evermore The ulcerous black wound, eating to the bone, Festered with thrills of agonizing pain. As when a beetling cliff, by seething seas Aye buffeted, is carved and underscooped, For all its stubborn strength, by tireless waves, Till, scourged by winds and lashed by tempest-flails, The sea into deep caves hath gnawed its base; So greater 'neath his foot grew evermore The festering wound, dealt when the envenomed fangs Tare him of that fell water-snake, which men Say dealeth ghastly wounds incurable, When the hot sun hath parched it as it crawls Over the sands; and so that mightiest man Lay faint and wasted with his cureless pain; And from the ulcerous wound aye streamed to earth Fetid corruption fouling all the floor