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Alun Lewis - The Odyssey Lyrics

When we sailed homewards burning embers
Fell softly hissing round us in the harbour;
The burning towers thundered valedictions,
The lurid waters gave no homeward welcome;
And shamefully we fled away from Troy.

We fared uncertain of our end, bewaring
Our heart's spasmodic hope or too close thinking
On Ithaca's fast harbour where the galleys
Rode side by side between the thrusting headlands,
Its olive groves and womеn in the vineyards.
We had a spatе of wenching inside Troy.

Rocks and inhospitable headlands and the sea,
The vain reiteration of our longing,
The silences, the long morose inbrooding
Exercised on us all a strange indifference,
While all the time our craft sailed like a bloodclot
The intricate sea-veins and sought the brain
Where even the fanciful lotus would fail to still our pain.
We left oblivion far behind us, in the reeking courts of Troy.

In Cyclops' cavern and in witch's pigsty
Deeper than fear or hate we knew the ache
For simpler things, the smart of sunburnt shoulder,
The dip of oars, the joke and all its laughter,
The times we traded peacefully with Troy.
But Circe and Calypso kept our master
And everywhere he feasted long and bragged.
More than was decent of his ancient exploits.
What did he fear to find at the end of the voyage?

His wife grown ugly, withered hands and lips
Mumbling a garbled story of his youth?
Or joy and ripeness in the flowing acres
And merry children - by another man?
Did he fear LIFE?

He drank too much and boasted
Too much about his ancient violence.
His eyes were mad each time he talked of Troy.

But still we sailed, like ugly gods enduring
The day-spring glittering with beauty,
And one of us kept notching up the moons
Along the rotting gunwale;still we kept
A fitful knowledge of ourselves; we wove
Into the pattern of our nervous thoughts
A vague confusing longing for the fields,
Homesteads and wives and children grown to manhood,
The pastoral life, the common satisfaction
Forfeited when we answered wrong with wrong.

And still at sunset we beheld the bastions
And burning towers of the lovely city
Immortalized by its destruction.
We knew that vision of a ruined age
To be the shape our minds and deeds had fashioned,
And we ourselves to be a wretched omen
Tossed in the tides and never making landfall,
A dying race whose doom it was to live.