Now each partakes the feast, the wine prepares,
Portions the food, and each his portion shares. 
The bard a herald guides; the gazing throng
Pay low obeisance as he moves along: 
Beneath a sculptur’d arch he sits enthroned,
The peers encircling form an awful round. 
Then, from the chine, Ulysses carves with art
Delicious food, an honorary part: 
“This, let the master of the lyre receive,
A pledge of love! ’tis all a wretch can give. 
Lives there a man beneath the spacious skies
Who sacred honours to the bard denies? 
The Muse the bard inspires, exalts his mind;
The muse indulgent loves the harmonious kind.”

The herald to his hand the charge conveys,
Not fond of flattery, nor unpleased with praise.

When now the rage of hunger was allay’d,
Thus to the lyrist wise Ulysses said: 
“O more than man! thy soul the muse inspires,
Or Phoebus animates with all his fires;
For who, by Phoebus uninform’d, could know
The woe of Greece, and sing so well the woe? 
Just to the tale, as present at the fray,
Or taught the labours of the dreadful day: 
The song recalls past horrors to my eyes,
And bids proud Ilion from her ashes rise. 
Once more harmonious strike the sounding string,
The Epaean fabric, framed by Pallas, sing: 
How stern Ulysses, furious to destroy,
With latent heroes sack’d imperial Troy. 
If faithful thou record the tale of Fame,
The god himself inspires thy breast with flame
And mine shall be the task henceforth to raise
In every land thy monument of praise.”

Full of the god he raised his lofty strain: 
How the Greeks rush’d tumultuous to the main;
How blazing tents illumined half the skies,
While from the shores the winged navy flies;
How e’en in Ilion’s walls, in deathful bands,
Came the stern Greeks by Troy’s assisting hands: 
All Troy up-heaved the steed; of differing mind,
Various the Trojans counsell’d:  part consign’d
The monster to the sword, part sentence gave
To plunge it headlong in the whelming wave;
The unwise award to lodge it in the towers,
An offering sacred to the immortal powers: 
The unwise prevail, they lodge it in the walls,
And by the gods’ decree proud Ilion falls: 
Destruction enters in the treacherous wood,
And vengeful slaughter, fierce for human blood.

He sung the Greeks stern-issuing from the steed,
How Ilion burns, how all her fathers bleed;
How to thy dome, Deiphobus! ascends
The Spartan king; how Ithacus attends
(Horrid as Mars); and how with dire alarms
He fights—­subdues, for Pallas strings his arms

Thus while he sung, Ulysses’ griefs renew,
Tears bathe his cheeks, and tears the ground bedew
As some fond matron views in mortal fight
Her husband falling in his country’s right;
Frantic through clashing swords she runs, she flies,
As ghastly pale he groans, and faints and dies;
Close to his breast she grovels on the ground,
And bathes with floods of tears the gaping wound;
She cries, she shrieks:  the fierce insulting foe
Relentless mocks her violence of woe: 
To chains condemn’d, as wildly she deplores;
A widow, and a slave on foreign shores.