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,
And inly pining for his native shore;
For now the soft enchantress pleased no more;
For now, reluctant, and constrained by charms,
Absent he lay in her desiring arms,
In slumber wore the heavy night away,
On rocks and shores consumed the tedious day;
There sate all desolate, and sighed alone,
With echoing sorrows made the mountains groan. 
And roll’d his eyes o’er all the restless main,
Till, dimmed with rising grief, they streamed again.

Here, on his musing mood the goddess press’d,
Approaching soft, and thus the chief address’d: 
“Unhappy man! to wasting woes a prey,
No more in sorrows languish life away: 
Free as the winds I give thee now to rove: 
Go, fell the timber of yon lofty grove,
And form a raft, and build the rising ship,
Sublime to bear thee o’er the gloomy deep. 
To store the vessel let the care be mine,
With water from the rock and rosy wine,
And life-sustaining bread, and fair array,
And prosperous gales to waft thee on the way. 
These, if the gods with my desire comply
(The gods, alas, more mighty far than I,
And better skill’d in dark events to come),
In peace shall land thee at thy native home.”

With sighs Ulysses heard the words she spoke,
Then thus his melancholy silence broke: 
“Some other motive, goddess! sways thy mind
(Some close design, or turn of womankind),
Nor my return the end, nor this the way,
On a slight raft to pass the swelling sea,
Huge, horrid, vast! where scarce in safety sails
The best-built ship, though Jove inspires the gales. 
The bold proposal how shall I fulfil,
Dark as I am, unconscious of thy will? 
Swear, then, thou mean’st not what my soul forebodes;
Swear by the solemn oath that binds the gods.”