Book 14
“But when your flight had saved you from that death
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of cruelty, the Cyclops, roaring rage,
paced all about Mount Aetna, groping through
its forests with his outstretched arms. Deprived
of sight, he stumbled there against the rocks,
until he reached the sea; and stretching out
his gore stained arms into its waters there,
he cursed all of the Grecian race, and said,
‘Oh! that some accident would carry back
Ulysses to me, or but one of his
companions; against whom my rage
might vent itself, whose joints my hand might tear
whose blood might drench my throat, whose living limbs
might quiver in my teeth. How trifling then,
how insignificant would be the loss,
of my sight which he took from me!’
and more he said. A ghastly horror took
possession of me when I saw his face
and every feature streaming yet with blood,
his ruthless hands, and the vile open space
where his one eye had been, and his coarse limbs,
and his beard matted through with human blood.
“It seemed as if Death were before my eyes,
yet that was but the least part of my woe.
I seemed upon the point of being caught,
my flesh about to be the food of his.
Before my mind was fixed the time I saw
two bodies of my loved companions
dashed three or four times hard against the ground,
when he above them, like a lion, crouched,
devouring quickly in his hideous jaws,
their entrails and their flesh and their crushed bones,
white marrowed, and their mangled quivering limbs.
A trembling fear seized on me as I stood
pallid and without power to move from there,
while I recalled him chewing greedily,
and belching out his bloody banquet from
his huge mouth—vomiting crushed pieces mixed
with phlegmy wine—and I feared such a doom
