Not she whose mortal beauty doomed her breath,
Nor she whose name the trembling poets fear;
But Euryale, whose cry outlives the death
Of bright-haired Medusa, rings the ear.
Her voice — a brazen blade the night must hear —
Goes keening through the caverns of the west;
When Perseus fled, it followed, sharp and clear,
A storm of grief no granite could arrest.
Immortal-born, she could not share the rest
That closed her sister’s ever-sleeping eyes;
So rage and mourning in one throat were pressed,
A sound the startled constellations prize.
Still through the dark her iron lament runs:
The loud one lives when quieter grief is done.