“What is the quality of my offence, Being constrained with dreadful circumstance? May my pure mind with the foul act dispense, My low-declined honour to advance? May any terms acquit me from this chance? The poisoned fountain clears itself again, And why not I from this compelled stain? With this, they all at once began to say, Her body’s stain her mind untainted clears, While with a joyless smile she turns away The face, that map which deep impression bears Of hard misfortune, carved in it with tears. “No, no,” quoth she, “no dame, hereafter living By my excuse shall claim excuse’s giving.” Here with a sigh, as if her heart would break, She throws forth Tarquin’s name: “He, he,” she says, But more than “he” her poor tongue could not speak; Till after many accents and delays, Untimely breathings, sick and short assays, She utters this: “He, he, fair lords, ’tis he, That guides this hand to give this wound to me.” Even here she sheathed in her harmless breast A harmful knife, that thence her soul unsheathed. That blow did bail it from the deep unrest Of that polluted prison where it breathed. Her contrite sighs unto the clouds bequeathed Her winged sprite, and through her wounds doth fly Life’s lasting date from cancelled destiny. Stone-still, astonished with this deadly deed, Stood Collatine and all his lordly crew, Till Lucrece’ father that beholds her bleed, Himself on her self-slaughtered body threw, And from the purple fountain Brutus drew The murd’rous knife, and, as it left the place, Her blood, in poor revenge, held it in chase; And bubbling from her breast, it doth divide In two slow rivers, that the crimson blood Circles her body in on every side, Who, like a late-sacked island, vastly stood Bare and unpeopled in this fearful flood. Some of her blood still pure and red remained, And some looked black, and that false Tarquin stained. About the mourning and congealed face Of that black blood a wat’ry rigol goes, Which seems to weep upon the tainted place; And ever since, as pitying Lucrece’ woes, Corrupted blood some watery token shows, And blood untainted still doth red abide, Blushing at that which is so putrified. “Daughter, dear daughter,” old Lucretius cries, “That life was mine which thou hast here deprived. If in the child the father’s image lies, Where shall I live now Lucrece is unlived? Thou wast not to this end from me derived. If children predecease progenitors, We are their offspring, and they none of ours. “Poor broken glass, I often did behold In thy sweet semblance my old age new born; But now that fair fresh mirror, dim and old, Shows me a bare-boned death by time outworn. O, from thy cheeks my image thou hast torn, And shivered all the beauty of my glass, That I no more can see what once I was!