9.

Where the border-line was crossed, that, sundering
  Death from life, keeps weariness from rest,
None can tell, who fares here forward wondering;
  None may doubt but here might end his quest. 
Here life’s lightning joys and woes once thundering
  Sea-like round him cease like storm suppressed.

10.

Here the wise wave-wandering steadfast-hearted
  Guest of many a lord of many a land
Saw the shape or shade of years departed,
  Saw the semblance risen and hard at hand,
Saw the mother long from love’s reach parted,
  Anticleia, like a statue stand.

11.

Statue? nay, nor tissued image woven
  Fair on hangings in his father’s hall;
Nay, too fast her faith of heart was proven,
  Far too firm her loveliest love of all;
Love wherethrough the loving heart was cloven,
  Love that hears not when the loud Fates call.

12.

Love that lives and stands up re-created
  Then when life has ebbed and anguish fled;
Love more strong than death or all things fated,
  Child’s and mother’s, lit by love and led;
Love that found what life so long awaited
  Here, when life came down among the dead.

13.

Here, where never came alive another,
  Came her son across the sundering tide
Crossed before by many a warrior brother
  Once that warred on Ilion at his side;
Here spread forth vain hands to clasp the mother
  Dead, that sorrowing for his love’s sake died.

14.

Parted, though by narrowest of divisions,
  Clasp he might not, only might implore,
Sundered yet by bitterest of derisions,
  Son, and mother from the son she bore—­
Here?  But all dispeopled here of visions
  Lies, forlorn of shadows even, the shore.

15.

All too sweet such men’s Hellenic speech is,
  All too fain they lived of light to see,
Once to see the darkness of these beaches,
  Once to sing this Hades found of me
Ghostless, all its gulfs and creeks and reaches,
  Sky, and shore, and cloud, and waste, and sea.

IV.

1.

But aloft and afront of me faring
  Far forward as folk in a dream
That strive, between doubting and daring
  Right on till the goal for them gleam,
Full forth till their goal on them lighten,
  The harbour where fain they would be,
What headlands there darken and brighten? 
    What change in the sea?

2.

What houses and woodlands that nestle
  Safe inland to lee of the hill
As it slopes from the headlands that wrestle
  And succumb to the strong sea’s will? 
Truce is not, nor respite, nor pity,
  For the battle is waged not of hands
Where over the grave of a city
    The ghost of it stands.

3.

Where the wings of the sea-wind slacken,
  Green lawns to the landward thrive,
Fields brighten and pine-woods blacken,
  And the heat in their heart is alive;
They blossom and warble and murmur,
  For the sense of their spirit is free: 
But harder to shoreward and firmer
    The grasp of the sea.