by W. B. Yeats
Now all are glad to see me, everyone wishes me well, all that want a favour from you ask speech of me — finding in that their hope.
Why should I give up these things and take those? No wise mind is treacherous. I am no contriver of plots, and if another took to them he would not come to me for help. And in proof of this go to the Pythian Oracle, and ask if I have truly told what the Gods said:
and after that, if you have found that I have plotted with the
Soothsayer, take me and kill me; not by the sentence of one mouth only — but of two mouths, yours and my own. But do not condemn me in a corner, upon some fancy and without proof. What right have you to declare a good man bad or a bad good? It is as bad a thing to cast off a true friend as it is for a man to cast away his own life — but you will learn these things with certainty when the time comes; for time alone shows a just man; though a day can show a knave.
CHORUS. King! He has spoken well, he gives himself time to think; a headlong talker does not know what he is saying.
OEDIPUS. The plotter is at his work, and I must counterplot headlong, or he will get his ends and I miss mine.
CREON. What will you do then? Drive me from the land?
OEDIPUS. Not so; I do not desire your banishment — but your death.
CREON. YOU are not sane.
OEDIPUS. I am sane at least in my own interest.
CREON. You should be in mine also.
OEDIPUS. NO, for you are false.
CREON. But if you understand nothing?
OEDIPUS. Yet I must rule.
CREON. Not if you rule badly.
OEDIPUS. Hear him, O Thebes!
CREON. Thebes is for me also, not for you alone.
CHORUS. Cease, princes: I see Jocasta coming out of the house; she comes just in time to quench the quarrel.
Jocasta enters
JOCASTA. Unhappy men! Why have you made this crazy uproar? Are you not ashamed to quarrel about your own affairs when the whole country is in trouble? Go back into the palace, Oedipus, and you, Creon, to your own house. Stop making all this noise about some petty thing.
CREON. Your husband is about to kill me — or to drive me from the land of my fathers.
OEDIPUS. Yes: for I have convicted him of treachery against me.
CREON. Now may I perish accursed if I have done such a thing!
JOCASTA. For God’s love believe it, Oedipus. First, for the sake of his oath, and then for my sake, and for the sake of these people here.
CHORUS [all]. King, do what she asks.
OEDIPUS. What would you have me do?
CHORUS. Not to make a dishonourable charge, with no more evidence than rumour, against a friend who has bound himself with an oath.
OEDIPUS. DO you desire my exile or my death?
CHORUS. NO, by Helios, by the first of all the Gods, may I die abandoned by Heaven and earth if I have that thought! What breaks my heart is that our public griefs should be increased by your quarrels.
OEDIPUS. Then let him go, though I am doomed thereby to death or to be thrust dishonoured from the land; it is your lips, not his, that move me to compassion; wherever he goes my hatred follows him.
CREON. YOU are as sullen in yielding as you were vehement in anger, but such natures are their own heaviest burden.
OEDIPUS. Why will you not leave me in peace and begone?
CREON. I will go away; what is your hatred to me? In the eyes of all here I am a just man.
[He goes.
CHORUS. Lady, why do you not take your man in to the house?
JOCASTA. I will do so when I have learned what has happened.
CHORUS. The half of it was blind suspicion bred of talk; the rest the wounds left by injustice.
JOCASTA. It was on both sides?
CHORUS. Yes.
JOCASTA. What was it?
CHORUS. Our land is vexed enough. Let the thing alone now that it is over.
JOCASTA. In the name of the Gods, King, what put you in this anger?
OEDIPUS. I will tell you; for I honour you more than these men do.
The cause is Creon and his plots against me.
JOCASTA. Speak on, if you can tell clearly how this quarrel arose.
OEDIPUS. He says that I am guilty of the blood of Laius.
JOCASTA. On his own knowledge, or on hearsay?
OEDIPUS. He has made a rascal of a seer his mouthpiece.
JOCASTA. DO not fear that there is truth in what he says. Listen to me, and learn to your comfort that nothing born of woman can know what is to come. I will give you proof of that. An oracle came to
Laius once, I will not say from Phoebus, but from his ministers, that he was doomed to die by the hand of his own child sprung from him and me. When his child was but three days old, Laius bound its feet together and had it thrown by sure hands upon a trackless mountain; and when Laius was murdered at the place where three highways meet, it was, or so at least the rumour says, by foreign robbers.
So Apollo did not bring it about that the child should kill its father, nor did Laius die in the dreadful way he feared by his child’s hand.
Yet that was how the message of the seers mapped out the future.
Pay no attention to such things. What the God would show he will need no help to show it, but bring it to light himself.
OEDIPUS. What restlessness of soul, lady, has come upon me since I heard you speak, what a tumult of the mind!
JOCASTA. What is this new anxiety? What has startled you?
OEDIPUS. YOU said that Laius was killed where three highways meet.
JOCASTA. Yes: that was the story.
OEDIPUS. And where is the place?
JOCASTA. In Phocis where the road divides branching off to Delphi and to Daulia.
OEDIPUS. And when did it happen? How many years ago?
JOCASTA. News was published in this town just before you came into power.
OEDIPUS. O Zeus! What have you planned to do unto me?
JOCASTA. He was tall; the silver had just come into his hair; and in shape not greatly unlike to you.
OEDIPUS. Unhappy that I am! It seems that I have laid a dreadful curse upon myself, and did not know it.
JOCASTA. What do you say? I tremble when I look on you, my King.
OEDIPUS. And I have a misgiving that the seer can see indeed. But I will know it all more clearly, if you tell me one thing more.
JOCASTA. Indeed, though I tremble I will answer whatever you ask.
OEDIPUS. Had he but a small troop with him; or did he travel like a great man with many followers?
JOCASTA. There were but five in all — one of them a herald; and there was one carriage with Laius in it.
OEDIPUS. Alas! It is now clear indeed. Who was it brought the news, lady?
JOCASTA. A servant — the one survivor.
OEDIPUS. IS he by chance in the house now?
JOCASTA. NO; for when he found you reigning instead of Laius he besought me, his hand clasped in mine, to send him to the fields among the cattle that he might be far from the sight of this town; and I sent him. He was a worthy man for a slave and might have asked a bigger thing.
OEDIPUS. I would have him return to us without delay.
JOCASTA. Oedipus, it is easy. But why do you ask this?
OEDIPUS. I fear that I have said too much, and therefore I would question him.
JOCASTA. He shall come, but I too have a right to know what lies so heavy upon your heart, my King.
OEDIPUS. Yes: and it shall not be kept from you now that my fear has grown so heavy. Nobody is more to me than you, nobody has the same right to learn my good or evil luck. My father was Polybus of Corinth, my mother the Dorian Merope, and I was held the foremost man in all that town until a thing happened — a thing to startle a man, though not to make him angry as it made me. We were sitting at the table, and a man who had drunk too much cried out that I was not my father’s son — and I, though angry, restrained my anger for that day; but the next day went to my father and m
y mother and questioned them. They were indignant at the taunt and that comforted me — and yet the man’s words rankled, for they had spread a rumour through the town. Without consulting my father or my mother I went to Delphi, but Phoebus told me nothing of the thing for which I came, but much of other things — things of sorrow and of terror: that I should live in incest with my mother, and beget a brood that men would shudder to look upon; that I should be my father’s murderer. Hearing those words I fled out of Corinth, and from that day have but known where it lies when I have found its direction by the stars. I sought where I might escape those infamous things — the doom that was laid upon me. I came in my flight to that very spot where you tell me this king perished. Now, lady, I will tell you the truth. When I had come close up to those three roads, I came upon a herald, and a man like him you have described seated in a carriage. The man who held the reins and the old man himself would not give me room, but thought to force me from the path, and I struck the driver in my anger. The old man, seeing what I had done, waited till I was passing him and then struck me upon the head. I paid him back in full, for I knocked him out of the carriage with a blow of my stick. He rolled on his back, and after that I killed them all. If this stranger were indeed Laius, is there a more miserable man in the world than the man before you? Is there a man more hated of Heaven?
No stranger, no citizen, may receive him into his house, not a soul may speak to him, and no mouth but my own mouth has laid this curse upon me. Am I not wretched? May I be swept from this world before I have endured this doom!
CHORUS. These things, O King, fill us with terror; yet hope till you speak with him that saw the deed and have learnt all.
OEDIPUS. Till I have learnt all, I may hope. I await the man that is coming from the pastures.
JOCASTA. What is it that you hope to learn?
OEDIPUS. I will tell you. If his tale agrees with yours, then I am clear.
JOCASTA. What tale of mine?
OEDIPUS. He told you that Laius met his death from robbers; if he keeps to that tale now and speaks of several slayers, I am not the slayer. But if he says one lonely wayfarer, then beyond a doubt the scale dips to me.
JOCASTA. Be certain of this much at least, his first tale was of robbers.
He cannot revoke that tale — the city heard it and not I alone. Yet, if he should somewhat change his story, King, at least he cannot make the murder of Laius square with prophecy; for Loxias plainly said of Laius that he would die by the hand of my child.
That poor innocent did not kill him, for it died before him. Therefore from this out I would not, for all divination can do, so much as look to my right hand or to my left hand, or fear at all.
OEDIPUS. YOU have judged well; and yet for all that, send and bring this peasant to me.
JOCASTA. I will send without delay. I will do all that you would have of me — but let us come in to the house.
[They go in to the house.
CHORUS. For this one thing above all I would be praised as a man,
That in my words and my deeds I have kept those laws in mind
Olympian Zeus, and that high clear Empyrean,
Fashioned, and not some man or people of mankind,
Even those sacred laws nor age nor sleep can blind.
A man becomes a tyrant out of insolence,
He climbs and climbs, until all people call him great,
He seems upon the summit, and God flings him thence;
Yet an ambitious man may lift up a whole State,
And in his death be blessed, in his life fortunate.
And all men honour such; but should a man forget
The holy images, the Delphian Sybil’s trance,
And the world’s navel-stone, and not be punished for it
And seem most fortunate, or even blessed perchance,
Why should we honour the Gods, or join the sacred dance?
Jocasta enters from the palace
JOCASTA. It has come into my head, citizens of Thebes, to visit every altar of the Gods, a wreath in my hand and a dish of incense. For all manner of alarms trouble the soul of Oedipus, who instead of weighing new oracles by old, like a man of sense, is at the mercy of every mouth that speaks terror. Seeing that my words are nothing to him, I cry to you, Lysian Apollo, whose altar is the first I meet: I come, a suppliant, bearing symbols of prayer; O, make us clean, for now we are all afraid, seeing him afraid, even as they who see the helmsman afraid.
Enter Messenger
MESSENGER. May I learn from you, strangers, where is the home of
King Oedipus? Or better still, tell me where he himself is, if you know.
CHORUS. This is his house, and he himself, stranger, is within it, and this lady is the mother of his children.
MESSENGER. Then I call a blessing upon her, seeing what man she has married.
JOCASTA. May God reward those words with a like blessing, stranger!
But what have you come to seek or to tell?
MESSENGER. Good news for your house, lady, and for your husband.
JOCASTA. What news? From whence have you come?
MESSENGER. From Corinth, and you will rejoice at the message I am about to give you; yet, maybe, it will grieve you.
JOCASTA. What is it? How can it have this double power?
MESSENGER. The people of Corinth, they say, will take him for king.
JOCASTA. HOW then? Is old Poly bus no longer on the throne?
MESSENGER. No. He is in his tomb.
JOCASTA. What do you say? Is Polybus dead, old man?
MESSENGER. May I drop dead if it is not the truth.
JOCASTA. Away! Hurry to your master with this news. O oracle of the Gods, where are you now? This is the man whom Oedipus feared and shunned lest he should murder him, and now this man has died a natural death, and not by the hand of Oedipus.
Enter Oedipus
OEDIPUS. Jocasta, dearest wife, why have you called me from the house?
JOCASTA. Listen to this man, and judge to what the oracles of the
Gods have come.
OEDIPUS. And he — who may he be? And what news has he?
JOCASTA. He has come from Corinth to tell you that your father,
Polybus, is dead.
OEDIPUS. How, stranger? Let me have it from your own mouth.
MESSENGER. If I am to tell the story, the first thing is that he is dead and gone.
OEDIPUS. By some sickness or by treachery?
MESSENGER. A little thing can bring the aged to their rest.
OEDIPUS. Ah! He died, it seems, from sickness?
MESSENGER. Yes; and of old age.
OEDIPUS. Alas! Alas! Why, indeed, my wife, should one look to that Pythian seer, or to the birds that scream above our heads? For they would have it that I was doomed to kill my father. And now he is dead — hid already beneath the earth. And here am I — who had no part in it, unless indeed he died from longing for me. If that were so, I may have caused his death; but Polybus has carried the oracles with him into Hades — the oracles as men have understood them — and they are worth nothing.
JOCASTA. Did I not tell you so, long since?
OEDIPUS. YOU did, but fear misled me.
JOCASTA. Put this trouble from you.
OEDIPUS. Those bold words would sound better, were not my mother living. But as it is — I have some grounds for fear; yet you have said well.
JOCASTA. Yet your father’s death is a sign that all is well.
OEDIPUS. I know that: but I fear because of her who lives.
MESSENGER. Who is this woman who makes you afraid?
OEDIPUS. Merope, old man, the wife of Polybus.
MESSENGER. What is there in her to make you afraid?
OEDIPUS. A dreadful oracle sent from Heaven, stranger.
MESSENGER. IS it a secret, or can you speak it out?
OEDIPUS. Loxias said that I was doomed to marry my own mother, and to shed my father’s blood. For that reason I fled from my house in Corinth; and I di
d right, though there is great comfort in familiar faces.
MESSENGER. Was it indeed for that reason that you went into exile?
OEDIPUS. I did not wish, old man, to shed my father’s blood.
MESSENGER. King, have I not freed you from that fear?
OEDIPUS. YOU shall be fittingly rewarded.
MESSENGER. Indeed, to tell the truth, it was for that I came; to bring you home and be the better for it —