[Love in disguise speaks to her orphan son]

You Heaven does not hate

Your ships driven on good a shore

Have courage in the face of Fate

Have faith and fear no more

.

Your scattered fleet is rejoined

Behold twelve swans above

Who have shepherded your ships

The birds of almighty Jove

.

My augury has come true

Now the path to Carthage pursue

.

The goddess turned in grace

Her scent ambrosial

Her hair a sweeping trace

To men queen Love is known

.

[the hero speaks]

You leave unkind and cruel

Your son you deceive and shun

In borrowed form and voice

Where do you run

.

They took the path

Her commands obeyed

Obscured in a misty shroud

The kindly goddess made

.

The goddess flew sublime

To her evergreen garden

In Paphos her holy shrine

Where a hundred altars smoke

And a thousand prayers chime

Aching hearts her powers invoke

Where garlands greenly vine

End 11

Notes

Both translations I am working from are extensively wordy, particularly where the doings and minutia of the deities were concerned, in much the way that modern comic superhero backstory and artifice are a never-ending object of fascination and focus. Please regard all such passages as those above as severely truncated. I do not consider this inauthentic according to the use of poetics as translucent portals upon events ancestral to the ancients, with such texts weighted doubly, in their original language and in English, with artistic accretions and poetic artifice.

Do note that the number of ships [7] making initial anchorage, the 12 swans and the 12 ships they guided, are assigned numbers of mythic significance, one being the days of the week and the other the months of the year as well as the number of greater deities of the Olympian pantheon. Also note that in Beowulf, “the swan road” is the name given to the sea lanes followed by seafaring men.