Explore "Helen" by Charles Lamb on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
High-born Helen, round your dwelling / These twenty years I've paced in vain; / Haughty beauty, thy lover's duty / Hath been to glory in his pain.
High-born Helen, proudly telling / Stories of thy cold disdain; / I starve, I die, now you comply, / And I no longer can complain.
These twenty years I've lived on tears, / Dwelling for ever on a frown; / On sighs I've fed, your scorn my bread; / I perish now you kind are grown.
Can I, who loved my beloved, / But for the scorn "was in her eye," / Can I be moved for my beloved / When she "returns me sigh for sigh?"
In stately pride, by my bedside, / High-born Helen's portrait's hung; / Deaf to my praise, my mournful lays / Are nightly to the portrait sung.
To that I weep, nor ever sleep, / Complaining all night long to her: / _Helen, grown old, no longer cold, / Said_, "You to all men I prefer. "