My will concurring with my queen’s command,

Accept the bath from this obsequious hand.

A strong emotion shakes my anguish’d breast:

In thy whole form Ulysses seems express’d;

Of all the wretched harboured on our coast,

None imaged e’er like thee my master lost.”


Thus half-discover’d through the dark disguise,

With cool composure feign’d, the chief replies:

“You join your suffrage to the public vote;

The same you think have all beholders thought.”


He said: replenish’d from the purest springs,

The laver straight with busy care she brings:

In the deep vase, that shone like burnish’d gold,

The boiling fluid temperates the cold.

Meantime revolving in his thoughtful mind

The scar, with which his manly knee was sign’d;

His face averting from the crackling blaze,

His shoulders intercept the unfriendly rays:

Thus cautious in the obscure he hoped to fly

The curious search of Euryclea’s eye.

Cautious in vain! nor ceased the dame to find

This scar with which his manly knee was sign’d.


This on Parnassus (combating the boar)

With glancing rage the tusky savage tore.

Attended by his brave maternal race,

His grandsire sent him to the sylvan chase,

Autolycus the bold (a mighty name

For spotless faith and deeds of martial fame:

Hermes, his patron god, those gifts bestow’d,

Whose shrine with weanling lambs he wont to load).

His course to Ithaca this hero sped,

When the first product of Laertes’ bed

Was now disclosed to birth: the banquet ends,

When Euryclea from the queen descends,

And to his fond embrace the babe commends:

“Receive (she cries) your royal daughter’s son;

And name the blessing that your prayers have won.”

Then thus the hoary chief: “My victor arms

Have awed the realms around with dire alarms:

A sure memorial of my dreaded fame

The boy shall bear; Ulysses be his name!

And when with filial love the youth shall come

To view his mother’s soil, my Delphic dome