Refuge nowhere can I find
Save Him only, if my mind
Will cast off before it die
The burden of this vanity.

One there was who reigned of old,
Big with wrath to brave and blast,
Lo, his name is no more told! 
And who followed met at last
His Third-thrower, and is gone. 
Only they whose hearts have known
Zeus, the Conqueror and the Friend,
They shall win their vision’s end;

Zeus the Guide, who made man turn
Thought-ward, Zeus, who did ordain
Man by Suffering shall Learn. 
So the heart of him, again
Aching with remembered pain,
Bleeds and sleepeth not, until
Wisdom comes against his will. 
’Tis the gift of One by strife
Lifted to the throne of life.

(AGAMEMNON accepted the sign.  Then came long delay, and storm while the fleet lay at Aulis.)

So that day the Elder Lord,
Marshal of the Achaian ships,
Strove not with the prophet’s word,
Bowed him to his fate’s eclipse,
When with empty jars and lips
Parched and seas impassable
Fate on that Greek army fell,
Fronting Chalcis as it lay,
By Aulis in the swirling bay.

(Till at last Calchas answered that Artemis was wroth and demanded the death of AGAMEMNON’S daughter.  The King’s doubt and grief.)

And winds, winds blew from Strymon River,
Unharboured, starving, winds of waste endeavour,
Man-blinding, pitiless to cord and bulwark,
  And the waste of days was made long, more long,
Till the flower of Argos was aghast and withered;
  Then through the storm rose the War-seer’s song,
And told of medicine that should tame the tempest,
  But bow the Princes to a direr wrong. 
Then “Artemis” he whispered, he named the name;
And the brother Kings they shook in the hearts of them,
And smote on the earth their staves, and the tears came.

But the King, the elder, hath found voice and spoken: 
“A heavy doom, sure, if God’s will were broken;
But to slay mine own child, who my house delighteth,
  Is that not heavy?  That her blood should flow
On her father’s hand, hard beside an altar? 
  My path is sorrow wheresoe’er I go. 
Shall Agamemnon fail his ships and people,
  And the hosts of Hellas melt as melts the snow? 
They cry, they thirst, for a death that shall break the spell,
For a Virgin’s blood:  ’tis a rite of old, men tell. 
And they burn with longing.—­O God may the end be well!”

(But ambition drove him, till he consented to the sin of slaying his daughter, Iphigenia, as a sacrifice.)

To the yoke of Must-Be he bowed him slowly,
  And a strange wind within his bosom tossed,
A wind of dark thought, unclean, unholy;
  And he rose up, daring to the uttermost. 
For men are boldened by a Blindness, straying
  Toward base desire, which brings grief hereafter,
    Yea, and itself is grief;
So this man hardened to his own child’s slaying,
  As help to avenge him for a woman’s laughter
    And bring his ships relief!