for their city', for, 'who was captain in the day on which'. 'Let me be dead and the earth be mounded (?) above me, ere I hear thy cries, and thy captivity[1] told of'. 'By no slow pace or want of swiftness of ours[2] did the Trojans obtain to strip the arms of Patroclus'. 'Here I am destined to perish, far from my father and mother dear; for all that, I will not', etc. 'Dare they not enter the fight, or stand in the council of heroes, all for fear of the shame and the taunts my crime has awakened?' One who regards all this to be high poetry,—emphatically 'noble',—may well think τὸν δ' ἀπαμειβόμενος or 'with him there came forty black galleys', or the broiling of the beef collops, to be such. When Mr Arnold regards 'no want of swiftness of ours'; 'for all that', in the sense of nevertheless; 'all for fear', i.e. because of the fear; not to be prosaic: my readers, however ignorant of Greek, will dispense with further argument from me. Mr Arnold's inability to discern prose in Greek is not to be trusted.
- ↑ He pares down ἑλκηθμοῖο (the dragging away of a woman by the hair) into 'captivity'! Better surely is my 'ignoble' version: 'Ere-that I see thee dragg'd away, and hear thy shriek of anguish'.
- ↑ He means ours for two syllables. 'Swiftness of ours' is surely ungrammatical. 'A galley of my own' = one of my own galleys; but 'a father of mine', is absurd, since each has but one father. I confess I have myself been seduced into writing 'those two eyes of his', to avoid 'those his two eyes': but I have since condemned and altered it.
