Unknown to pain, in age resign thy breath,

When late stern Neptune points the shaft with death:

To the dark grave retiring as to rest,

Thy people blessing, by thy people bless’d!


“Unerring truths, O man, my lips relate;

This is thy life to come, and this is fate.’


“To whom unmoved: ‘If this the gods prepare,

What Heaven ordains the wise with courage bear.

But say, why yonder on the lonely strands,

Unmindful of her son, Anticlea stands?

Why to the ground she bends her downcast eye?

Why is she silent, while her son is nigh?

The latent cause, O sacred seer, reveal!’


“‘Nor this (replies the seer) will I conceal.

Know, to the spectres that thy beverage taste,

The scenes of life recur, and actions past:

They, seal’d with truth, return the sure reply;

The rest, repell’d, a train oblivious fly.’


“The phantom-prophet ceased, and sunk from sight,

To the black palace of eternal night.


“Still in the dark abodes of death I stood,

When near Anticlea moved, and drank the blood.

Straight all the mother in her soul awakes,

And, owning her Ulysses, thus she speaks;

‘Comest thou, my son, alive, to realms beneath,

The dolesome realms of darkness and of death!

Comest thou alive from pure, ethereal day?

Dire is the region, dismal is the way!

Here lakes profound, there floods oppose their waves,

There the wide sea with all his billows raves!

Or (since to dust proud Troy submits her towers)

Comest thou a wanderer from the Phrygian shores?

Or say, since honour call’d thee to the field,

Hast thou thy Ithaca, thy bride, beheld?’


“‘Source of my life,’ I cried, ‘from earth I fly

To seek Tiresias in the nether sky,

To learn my doom; for, toss’d from woe to woe,

In every land Ulysses finds a foe:

Nor have these eyes beheld my native shores,

Since in the dust proud Troy submits her towers.


“‘But, when thy soul from her sweet mansion fled,

Say, what distemper gave thee to the dead?