Four Tragedies and Octavia
Page 19
And yellow girdle at your waist
In girlish fashion. And you wear it still,
The loose-draped robe and flowing skirt,
The garb of gentleness.
Thus you were known
To all the countries of the farthest East,
To those that drink the waters of the Ganges
And those that break the ice-floes of Araxes,
Upon a golden chariot riding,
Over the lion’s back
Your long robes trailing.
And old Silenus on his humble ass
Is there to follow you, with ivy garlands
Crowning his bulging forehead; while a rout
Of ribald merrymakers dance their secret mysteries.
In Thrace your revellers follow you,
Edonian dancers on Pangaeus
And on the heights of Pindus.
In Thebes you are Iacchus of Ogygia,1
Your worshippers the Cadmian women,
Wanton maenads, clad in skins,
Thyrsus in hand, hair flying free,
Possessed with madness at your will.
Pentheus is torn to pieces; then the grip
Of passion is released, the bacchant throng
Regard their horrid handiwork
As if they knew not whose it was.
A sister of the mother of bright Bacchus
Is Theban Ino,1 mistress of the sea.
The Nereids dance with her; and young Palaemon,2
Kinsman of Bacchus and a great god too,
Has joined the company of the divinities
Who rule the waves.
At sea Tyrrhenian pirates made a prize
Of our young Bacchus. Nereus calmed
The angry waves and made the deep blue sea
Become a meadow. Plane trees rose
As green as springtime, and the laurel
Dear to Phoebus; birds sang in the branches.
Round the oars green ivy sprouted,
Vines depended from the yard-arms.
A lion of Ida roared upon the prow,
An Indian tiger at the stern.
The pirates panicked; jumped into the sea;
And as they swam they were transformed;
They lost their arms, their breasts were doubled down
Into their bellies; fins like little hands
Hung from their sides; and through the waves they dived,
Round-backed, with crescent tails that flipped the water –
A school of graceful dolphins following
The flying ship!
In Lydia you would sail
Upon the rich Pactolus, flowing golden
Between its sun-scorched banks;
Where Massagetan warriors, quaffing cups
Of blood and milk, at your command
Unstrung their bows
And laid their barbarous arrows down.
Your power was known
By King Lycurgus,1 smiter with the axe.
Your power was known by savage Zalaces,
And by the nomad tribes
Who feel the north wind near,
The dwellers on Maeotis’ frozen shores,
And those upon whose heads
The Bear and the two Wains look down.
Bacchus subdued the sparse Gelonians.
Bacchus disarmed the women warriors;
The wild hordes of the Amazons
Bowed down their faces to the ground,
Abandoned archery
And joined the Bacchic dance.
Upon Cithaeron’s holy mount
The blood of Pentheus flowed.
The daughters of King Proetus ran away
To worship Bacchus in the woods of Argos,
In his stepmother’s sight.2
In Naxos, the Aegean isle, he found
A bride, deserted by her former lover;
Hers was the gain, far greater than her loss.
And there the juices of the vine,
Beloved of the night-haunting god,
Sprang from the barren rock; new rivulets
Trickled across the fields; the earth drank deeply
Of whitest milk and the thyme-scented wine of Lesbos.
And when the bride was led into high heaven,
Phoebus was there, with radiant hair aflame,
To sing the nuptial song; two Cupids bore aloft
The torches; Jupiter laid down
His fiery darts; he would not touch his thunderbolts
With Bacchus at his side.
As long as the lights of the everlasting heavens run their course –
As long as the waves of Ocean wrap the world –
As long as the Moon can wane and wax again to the full –
As long as the Star of Day brings promise of the dawn –
As long as the Great Bear never meets the Lord of the deep blue sea –
So long shall we adore the fair face of our lovely Bacchus.
ACT THREE
Oedipus, Creon
OEDIPUS: Though there is news of sorrow in your face,
Yet tell it. By whose life must we appease
The jealous gods?
CREON: You order me to tell
That which my fears would urge me to conceal.
OEDIPUS: Does not the ruin of Thebes urge you to speak?
What of the downfall of the royal house
Of which you are a brother?
CREON: What you seek
So hastily to know, you will soon wish
Not to have known.
OEDIPUS: Evil cannot be cured
By ignorance. To smother every clue
To the solution of our country’s plight –
Is that your wish?
CREON: When medicine is foul,
The cure may be unpleasant.1
OEDIPUS: What have you heard?
Tell me, or you shall learn at heavy cost
What force an angered monarch can command.
CREON: What he has ordered to be said, a king
May hate to hear.
OEDIPUS: Your miserable life
Will be the one dispatched to Erebus
For all our sakes, if you refuse to tell
The hidden meaning of our sacrifice.
CREON: Is there no right of silence? Is not that
The smallest privilege a king could grant?
OEDIPUS: The right of silence often holds more danger
To king and kingdom than the right of speech.
CREON: If silence is not free, what freedom is there?
OEDIPUS: He that is silent when required to speak
Shakes the stability of government.
CREON: What I am forced to say, please hear with patience.
OEDIPUS: There is no penalty for forced disclosure.
CREON: Outside the city, a dark ilex-grove
Stands near the waters of the Vale of Dirce.
Above the rest a cypress, evergreen,
Lifts its tall head and seems to hold the grove
Sheltered in its embrace; two ancient oaks
Spread out a tangle of half-rotted boughs,
One partly crumbled by consuming age,
The other falling from its withered roots
And leaning on its neighbour for support.
The bitter-berried laurel grows there too,
And Paphian myrtle, and smooth lime, and alder
(Wood that may soon be speeding under oars
Across the boundless sea); a lofty pine
Stands in the eye of the sun, its straight-grained limbs
Braced firm against the winds. One massive tree
Stands in the centre, overshadowing
The lesser trunks, and seems to guard the grove
With its vast span of spreading foliage.
Beneath it drips a dark and sombre spring;
Ice-cold – because it never sees the sun –
Its sluggish waters creep into a swamp.
To this place came the aged priest, and
soon
(There was no need to wait for night to fall,
The darkness of the grove was dark as night)
A pit was dug and brands from funeral pyres
Thrown into it. Tiresias put on
A sable robe, and waved a spray of leaves.
His step was solemn and his aspect grim,
Robed head to foot in the funereal garb,
His white hair wreathed with yew, symbol of death.
Into the pit black oxen and black sheep
Were led; the flames devoured the offering,
A feast of living flesh that leapt in pain
Upon the fire of death. The priest invoked
The souls of the departed, and their king,
And him who guards the gate to Lethe’s lake.
In awful tones he spoke the magic words
And incantations, those which can placate
And those which can command the shadowy ghosts.
He poured blood on the hearth, saw that the flames
Consumed the beasts entire, and drenched the pit
With their spilt gore. Libations then, of milk
Snow-white, and wine with his left hand, he poured
Upon the fire, and uttered prayers again.
Then in a louder and more awful voice,
His eyes fixed on the ground, he summoned forth
The spirits of the dead. Loud bayed the hounds
Of Hecate, the valley boomed three times,
A tremor shook the ground beneath our feet.
‘They hear me,’ said the priest; ‘my words had power;
The black void opens and the citizens
Of hell are given a passage to our world.’
The trees bowed down, their foliage bristling;
Trunks split apart and the whole forest quaked.
The earth reeled backwards and groaned inwardly.
Was Acheron enraged at this assault
Upon its secrets – or was this the noise
Of earth bursting its prison gates to give
A passage to the dead? Or Cerberus
The triple-headed hound in anger shaking
His heavy chains? Soon after this, earth gaped
And a vast chasm was revealed. I saw
Down in the darkness the unmoving lake;
I saw the colourless divinities;
I saw the quintessential night. My blood
Froze in my body and my heart stopped beating.
Out of the pit came forth an angry brood;
They stood before us armed, the viper’s brood,
The children of the dragon’s teeth, and with them
Plague, the devouring spoiler of our people.
Then came the sound of the grim fiend Erinys,
Of Horror and blind Fury and all things
Created and concealed in the dark womb
Of everlasting night. There Sorrow stood
Clutching her hair, there drooped the heavy head
Of Sickness, Age bowed down with her own burden,
And menacing Fear. No life was left in us;
Manto herself, no stranger to the arts
And rites her father practised, stood amazed.
He showed no fear; his blindness lent him courage;
He called into our sight the lifeless hosts
Of the inexorable king of death,
And there the insubstantial shapes appeared,
Floating like clouds and feeding on the air
Of open sky. Numberless multitudes
Answered the prophet’s summons – more than all
The leaves that grow and fall upon Mount Eryx,
The flowers that bloom in the high spring of Hybla
When bees hang in dense swarms, or all the waves
That break across the Ionian sea, the birds
That fleeing winter and the frozen bite
Of Strymon cross the sky from Arctic snows
To the warm valley of the Nile; so, fearful
And shivering, the ghosts came crowding in
To shelter in the grove. First to appear
Was Zethus, wrestling with an angry bull;
Amphion followed, with the tortoise-shell
In his left hand, whose music charmed the stones.
Niobe, reunited with her children,
Held up her head in happy pride, content
With all her dead around her. Next to come
Was a more heartless mother, mad Agave,
Followed by all that company of women
Who tore the body of their king to pieces;
Pentheus was with them too, a mangled wreck,
But arrogant as ever. Last of all,
After the priest had called him many times,
Came one, who seemed ashamed to raise his head,
Tried to remain unseen, and shrank away
From all the other ghosts; the priest insisted,
With oft repeated prayers to the dark powers,
Until he had drawn forth into full view
The hidden face – and there stood Laius!
How can I tell you – how forlorn he looked
As he stood there, blood streaming down his limbs,
His hair disordered and begrimed. He spoke,
As one deranged, and this is what he said:
‘O you wild women of the house of Cadmus,
Lusting for kindred blood, go shake the thyrsus,
But in your orgies let it be your sons
You mutilate; away with mother-love,
It is the cardinal sin of Thebes. O Thebes,
By sin, not by the anger of the gods,
You are destroyed. Your plague has not been brought
By the dry breath of the rain-thirsty earth,
Nor by the south wind’s scourge; but by a king
With blood upon his hands, who claimed a throne
As his reward for murder and defiled
His father’s marriage-bed: unnatural son,
And yet more infamous a father he,
Who by incestuous rape did violate
The womb which gave him birth, against all law –
A thing scarce any animal will do –
Begat from his own mother sons of shame,
Children to be his brothers! Vile confusion,
Monstrous complexity of sin, more subtle
Than that shrewd Sphinx he boasts of. Murderer!
Whose blood-stained hand now grasps the sceptre, thee
I shall pursue, thy father unavenged;
I and all Thebes shall hunt thee, and shall bring
The Fury who attended on thy marriage
With whips to scourge thy guilt; shall overthrow
Thy house of shame, destroy with civil war
Thy hearth and home. People, expel your king!
Drive him immediately from your land;
Soon as your soil is rid of his curs’d feet,
Its springtime will return, its grass be green,
The beauty of the woods will bloom again,
And pure air fill you with the breath of life.
With him, as his fit company, shall go
Death and Corruption, Sickness, Suffering,
Plague, and Despair. Nay, it shall even be
That he himself would gladly quit our land
As fast as feet can carry him; but I
Shall halt those feet; I shall retard his flight;
He shall go creeping, groping, stick in hand,
Feeling his way like one infirm with age.
While you deprive him of your earth, his father
Will banish him for ever from the sky.’
OEDIPUS: Fear chills my body, every bone and limb.
Of every act that I have feared to do
I am accused. And yet against the charge
Of sinful marriage Merope defends me,
For she is still the wife of Polybus.
And Polybus still lives; my hands are clean
Of that offence. One
parent witnesses
My innocence of murder, by the other
I am acquitted of inchastity.
How else can I be guilty? Laius?
His death was mourned at Thebes before I came,
Ay, long before I touched Boeotian soil.
Is the old prophet wrong – or is some god
An enemy of Thebes?… Yes, here I have it!
The treacherous conspirators are here!
The priest devised this lie, using the gods
As screen for his deception, and to you
He means to give my sceptre.
CREON: Would I want
To see my sister ousted from her throne?
No, if my solemn duty to my house
And to my family were not enough
To keep me in my proper place, the fear
Of greater, and more dangerous, eminence
Would hold me back. Perhaps you would do well
To shed your burden while you safely can,
Rather than wait for it to fall and crush you
When you attempt to shake it off. Step down,
Now, while you can, into a humbler place.
OEDIPUS: Are you advising me to abdicate
My crown and all its cares?
CREON: I would advise it
To anyone who had the choice; for you
No choice remains but to endure your fate.
OEDIPUS: There is the power-seeker’s surest card!
To cry up moderation, to extol
Peace and contentment! The pretence of peace
Is the sharp practice of the malcontent.
CREON: Does my long loyalty not speak for me?
OEDIPUS: Through loyalty lies the traitor’s way to mischief.
CREON: Already I enjoy, without its cares,
All the advantages of royal rank.
My house is blessed with multitudes of friends;
With every day that dawns, remunerations
Of my connexion with the royal house
Flow to my door; rich living, choicest fare,
And the ability to save the lives
Of many men by my good offices.
What more could Fortune give me?
OEDIPUS: That much more
That still you lack. Good fortune knows no limits.
CREON: Am I condemned, found guilty without trial?
OEDIPUS: Have I been given a trial? Has my life
Been put in the balance? Has Tiresias heard me?
Yet I have been condemned already. You
Set the example, I but follow it.
CREON: Is it not possible that I am guiltless?
OEDIPUS: A king must guard against the possible
As against certain danger.
CREON: He that fears
Imaginary dangers should be made