Page:A New Zealand verse (1906).pdf/243
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Nausicaa.
207
Yes! most unworthy of a modest maid,
To show my liking for a parting guest;
Phæacia’s daughters are not wont to woo.
So, without further speech, he sailed away.
But yet, at times, I think the stranger loved me,
And, all those years, no day has glided by
But I have seaward cast my longing eyes,
If I might o’er the waves perchance descry
His white sails swollen by the eastern breeze.
In all these years no tidings yet have sped
From the broad outer world to this lone isle,
Girt by the main as by an iron band.
And day by day my home-bred suitor came,
Wooing me with his rough Phæacian speech,
Not like that other’s whose clear accents fell
As the smooth rippling of a full-fed stream.
And, as I still delayed, my handmaids said,
“The youth is comely, princess why delay?”
And my grey mother spake in mild rebuke,
“Daughter, why let the glory of thy youth
Slip idly by? Long hath the patient youth
Stood by, expectant; make him happy now.”
Then last of all, my sire, in weighty words,
Told me it was not well a girl of his
Should lack a guardian when her sire was gone,
For his own thread of life was nearly spun—
And so at last I yielded. Well I wist
That other one would come back nevermore,
And that I had but fed me on a dream.
To show my liking for a parting guest;
Phæacia’s daughters are not wont to woo.
So, without further speech, he sailed away.
But yet, at times, I think the stranger loved me,
And, all those years, no day has glided by
But I have seaward cast my longing eyes,
If I might o’er the waves perchance descry
His white sails swollen by the eastern breeze.
In all these years no tidings yet have sped
From the broad outer world to this lone isle,
Girt by the main as by an iron band.
And day by day my home-bred suitor came,
Wooing me with his rough Phæacian speech,
Not like that other’s whose clear accents fell
As the smooth rippling of a full-fed stream.
And, as I still delayed, my handmaids said,
“The youth is comely, princess why delay?”
And my grey mother spake in mild rebuke,
“Daughter, why let the glory of thy youth
Slip idly by? Long hath the patient youth
Stood by, expectant; make him happy now.”
Then last of all, my sire, in weighty words,
Told me it was not well a girl of his
Should lack a guardian when her sire was gone,
For his own thread of life was nearly spun—
And so at last I yielded. Well I wist
That other one would come back nevermore,
And that I had but fed me on a dream.
William Hodgson