“Though night, dissolving grief in grateful ease, Your drooping eyes with soft impression seize; Awhile, reluctant to her pleasing force, Suspend the restful hour with sweet discourse. The day (ne’er brighten’d with a beam of joy!) My menials, and domestic cares employ; And, unattended by sincere repose, The night assists my ever-wakeful woes; When nature’s hush’d beneath her brooding shade, My echoing griefs the starry vault invade. As when the months are clad in flowery green, Sad Philomel, in bowery shades unseen, To vernal airs attunes her varied strains; And Itylus sounds warbling o’er the plains; Young Itylus, his parents’ darling joy! Whom chance misled the mother to destroy; Now doom’d a wakeful bird to wail the beauteous boy. So in nocturnal solitude forlorn, A sad variety of woes I mourn! My mind, reflective, in a thorny maze Devious from care to care incessant strays. Now, wavering doubt succeeds to long despair; Shall I my virgin nuptial vow revere; And, joining to my son’s my menial train, Partake his counsels, and assist his reign? Or, since, mature in manhood, he deplores His dome dishonour’d, and exhausted stores; Shall I, reluctant! to his will accord; And from the peers select the noblest lord; So by my choice avow’d, at length decide These wasteful love-debates, a mourning bride! A visionary thought I’ll now relate; Illustrate, if you know, the shadow’d fate: “A team of twenty geese (a snow-white train!) Fed near the limpid lake with golden grain, Amuse my pensive hours. The bird of Jove Fierce from his mountain-eyrie downward drove; Each favourite fowl he pounced with deathful sway, And back triumphant wing’d his airy way. My pitying eyes effused a plenteous stream, To view their death thus imaged in a dream; With tender sympathy to soothe my soul, A troop of matrons, fancy-form’d, condole. But whilst with grief and rage my bosom burn’d, Sudden the tyrant of the skies returned; Perch’d on the battlements he thus began (In form an eagle, but in voice a man): `O queen! no vulgar vision of the sky I come, prophetic of approaching joy; View in this plumy form thy victor-lord; The geese (a glutton race) by thee deplored, Portend the suitors fated to my sword.’ This said, the pleasing feather’d omen ceased. When from the downy bands of sleep released, Fast by the limpid lake my swan-like train I found, insatiate of the golden grain.” “The vision self-explain’d (the chief replies) Sincere reveals the sanction of the skies; Ulysses speaks his own return decreed; And by his sword the suitors sure to bleed.”