Agamemnon
Aeschylus
Aeschylus. The poetical works of Robert Browning, Volume 13. Browning, Robert, translator; Berdoe, Edward, editor. London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1889.
- Narrow deckways ill-strewn, too, — what the day’s woe
- We did not groan at getting for our portion?
- As for land-things, again, on went more hatred!
- Since beds were ours hard by the foemen’s ramparts,
- And, out of heaven and from the earth, the meadow
- Dews kept a-sprinkle, an abiding damage
- Of vestures, making hair a wild-beast matting.
- Winter, too, if one told of it — bird-slaying —
- Such as, unbearable, Idaian snow brought —
- Or heat, when waveless, on its noontide couches
- Without a wind, the sea would slumber falling
- — Why must one mourn these? O’er and gone is labour:
- O’er and gone is it, even to those dead ones,
- So that no more again they mind uprising.
- Why must we tell in numbers those deprived ones,
- And the live man be vexed with fate’s fresh outbreak?
- Rather, I bid full farewell to misfortunes!
- For us, the left from out the Argeian army,
- The gain beats, nor does sorrow counterbalance.
- So that ’t is fitly boasted of, this sunlight,