Penelope spoke again. Stranger, I would ask you one thing more. It is nearly bedtime for those who can sleep through sorrow; for me an angel of dreams visits me, and I lie waking, and my heart is torn. Tonight I dreamed that twenty fat geese were eating wheat in my house, and I took pleasure watching them. Then a great eagle came from the mountain, broke their necks, and left them dead in the hall, and flew up into the clear sky. She asked him to read the dream if he could, for her heart was divided.
I wept and cried aloud, though it was only a dream, and the Achaean women with fair hair gathered about me as I grieved for my geese. Then the eagle came back and perched on a projecting rafter and spoke with a human voice: Take heart, daughter of Icarius. This is no dream but a true vision that shall be fulfilled. The geese are the suitors, and I, who was the eagle, am your husband come back to destroy them. I woke, she said, and looked about, and there were the geese in the house, feeding at their trough as before.
This dream, madam, Odysseus replied, can admit of only one reading. Odysseus himself has told you how it will end. The suitors' destruction is plain; not one shall escape death and the fates. Dreams are curious and hard to read, Penelope answered. Two gates there are for shadowy dreams: one of horn, one of ivory. Those that come through sawn ivory deceive us with empty words; those that come through polished horn bring truth to pass. My strange dream did not come, I think, from the horn. So she spoke, unwilling to trust hope too far, though his words had stirred her.
The day is near when I must leave Odysseus's house — that day I shall appoint a contest with those axes he used to set in a row in his hall, twelve in all, like stays for a ship, and shoot an arrow through them all. Now I shall set this contest for the suitors. Whoever strings the bow most easily and shoots an arrow through all twelve axes — him I will follow, leaving this house of my marriage, so beautiful and full of wealth. I think I shall remember it, even in my dreams. She said this as one who had measured the day in her mind and found no other road left open.
You need not put off the contest, Odysseus said. Odysseus will be here before these men handle that bow and stretch the string and send an arrow through the iron. As long as you sit and talk, Penelope said, I have no wish to sleep. Yet people cannot go forever without rest; and I have a bed upstairs, fretted with woe ever since Odysseus went to hateful Troy that should not be named. I will go up and lie there. He answered gently that sleep would come when the gods willed, and that tomorrow would bring what tomorrow must.
She went upstairs with her maidens, and in her room she wept for Odysseus, her dear husband, until bright-eyed Athena cast sweet sleep upon her eyelids.