Still to your own ethereal race the worst!

Ye envy mortal and immortal joy,

And love, the only sweet of life destroy,

Did ever goddess by her charms engage

A favour’d mortal, and not feel your rage?

So when Aurora sought Orion’s love,

Her joys disturbed your blissful hours above,

Till, in Ortygia Dian’s winged dart

Had pierced the hapless hunter to the heart,

So when the covert of the thrice-eared field

Saw stately Ceres to her passion yield,

Scarce could Iasion taste her heavenly charms,

But Jove’s swift lightning scorched him in her arms.

And is it now my turn, ye mighty powers!

Am I the envy of your blissful bowers?

A man, an outcast to the storm and wave,

It was my crime to pity, and to save;

When he who thunders rent his bark in twain,

And sunk his brave companions in the main,

Alone, abandon’d, in mid-ocean tossed,

The sport of winds, and driven from every coast,

Hither this man of miseries I led,

Received the friendless, and the hungry fed;

Nay promised (vainly promised) to bestow

Immortal life, exempt from age and woe.

’Tis past-and Jove decrees he shall remove;

Gods as we are, we are but slaves to Jove.

Go then he must (he must, if he ordain,

Try all those dangers, all those deeps, again);

But never, never shall Calypso send

To toils like these her husband and her friend.

What ships have I, what sailors to convey,

What oars to cut the long laborious way?

Yet I’ll direct the safest means to go;

That last advice is all I can bestow.”


To her the power who hears the charming rod;

“Dismiss the man, nor irritate the god;

Prevent the rage of him who reigns above,

For what so dreadful as the wrath of Jove?”

Thus having said, he cut the cleaving sky,

And in a moment vanished from her eye,

The nymph, obedient to divine command,

To seek Ulysses, paced along the sand,

Him pensive on the lonely beach she found,

With streaming eyes in briny torrents drown’d,