O let me, let me not thine anger move,

That I forbore, thus, thus to speak my love:

Thus in fond kisses, while the transport warms

Pour out my soul and die within thine arms!

I dreaded fraud! Men, faithless men, betray

Our easy faith, and make our sex their prey:

Against the fondness of my heart I strove:

’Twas caution, O my lord! not want of love.

Like me had Helen fear’d, with wanton charms

Ere the fair mischief set two worlds in arms;

Ere Greece rose dreadful in the avenging day;

Thus had she fear’d, she had not gone astray.

But Heaven, averse to Greece, in wrath decreed

That she should wander, and that Greece should bleed:

Blind to the ills that from injustice flow,

She colour’d all our wretched lives with woe.

But why these sorrows when my lord arrives?

I yield, I yield! my own Ulysses lives!

The secrets of the bridal bed are known

To thee, to me, to Actoris alone

(My father’s present in the spousal hour,

The sole attendant on our genial bower).

Since what no eye hath seen thy tongue reveal’d,

Hard and distrustful as I am, I yield.”


Touch’d to the soul, the king with rapture hears,

Hangs round her neck, and speaks his joy in tears.

As to the shipwreck’d mariner, the shores

Delightful rise, when angry Neptune roars:

Then, when the surge in thunder mounts the sky,

And gulf’d in crowds at once the sailors die;

If one, more happy, while the tempest raves,

Outlives the tumult of conflicting waves,

All pale, with ooze deform’d, he views the strand,

And plunging forth with transport grasps the land:

The ravish’d queen with equal rapture glows,

Clasps her loved lord, and to his bosom grows.

Nor had they ended till the morning ray,

But Pallas backward held the rising day,

The wheels of night retarding, to detain

The gay Aurora in the wavy main;

Whose flaming steeds, emerging through the night,

Beam o’er the eastern hills with streaming light.


At length Ulysses with a sigh replies: