My curse on him whoe’er unrived The waif’s fell fetters and my life revived! He meant me well, yet had he left me there, He had saved my friends and me a world of care.
Chorus: I too had wished it so.
Oedipus: Then had I never come to shed My father’s blood nor climbed my mother’s bed; The monstrous offspring of a womb defiled, Co-mate of him who gendered me, and child. Was ever man before afflicted thus, Like Oedipus.
Chorus: I cannot say that thou hast counseled well, For thou wert better dead than living blind.
Oedipus: What’s done was well done. Thou canst never shake My firm belief. A truce to argument. For, had I sight, I know not with what eyes I could have met my father in the shades, Or my poor mother, since against the twain I sinned, a sin no gallows could atone. Aye, but, ye say, the sight of children joys A parent’s eyes. What, born as mine were born? No, such a sight could never bring me joy;
Nor this fair city with its battlements, Its temples and the statues of its gods, Sights from which I, now wretchedst of all, Once ranked the foremost Theban in all Thebes, By my own sentence am cut off, condemned By my own proclamation ’gainst the wretch, The miscreant by heaven itself declared Unclean—and of the race of Laius. Thus branded as a felon by myself,
How had I dared to look you in the face? Nay, had I known a way to choke the springs Of hearing, I had never shrunk to make A dungeon of this miserable frame, Cut off from sight and hearing; for ’tis bliss To bide in regions sorrow cannot reach. Why didst thou harbour me, Cithaeron, why Didst thou not take and slay me? Then I never Had shown to men the secret of my birth.
O Polybus, O Corinth, O my home, Home of my ancestors (so wast thou called) How fair a nursling then I seemed, how foul The canker that lay festering in the bud! Now is the blight revealed of root and fruit. Ye triple high-roads, and thou hidden glen, Coppice, and pass where meet the three-branched ways, Ye drank my blood, the life-blood these hands spilt, My father’s; do ye call to mind perchance
Those deeds of mine ye witnessed and the work I wrought thereafter when I came to Thebes? O fatal wedlock, thou didst give me birth, And, having borne me, sowed again my seed, Mingling the blood of fathers, brothers, children, Brides, wives and mothers, an incestuous brood, All horrors that are wrought beneath the sun, Horrors so foul to name them were unmeet. O, I adjure you, hide me anywhere
Far from this land, or slay me straight, or cast me Down to the depths of ocean out of sight. Come hither, deign to touch an abject wretch; Draw near and fear not; I myself must bear The load of guilt that none but I can share.
Enter Creon.
Creon: Lo, here is Creon, the one man to grant Thy prayer by action or advice, for he Is left the State’s sole guardian in thy stead.
Oedipus: Ah me! what words to accost him can I find? What cause has he to trust me? In the past I have bee proved his rancorous enemy.
Creon: Not in derision, Oedipus, I come Nor to upbraid thee with thy past misdeeds.
To Bystanders.
But shame upon you! if ye feel no sense Of human decencies, at least revere The Sun whose light beholds and nurtures all. Leave not thus nakedly for all to gaze at A horror neither earth nor rain from heaven Nor light will suffer. Lead him straight within, For it is seemly that a kinsman’s woes Be heard by kin and seen by kin alone.
Oedipus: O listen, since thy presence comes to me A shock of glad surprise—so noble thou, And I so vile—O grant me one small boon. I ask it not on my behalf, but thine.
Creon: And what the favor thou wouldst crave of me?
Oedipus: Forth from thy borders thrust me with all speed; Set me within some vasty desert where No mortal voice shall greet me any more.
Creon: This had I done already, but I deemed It first behoved me to consult the god.
Oedipus: His will was set forth fully—to destroy The parricide, the scoundrel; and I am he.
Creon: Yea, so he spake, but in our present plight ’Twere better to consult the god anew.
Oedipus: Dare ye inquire concerning such a wretch?
Creon: Yea, for thyself wouldst credit now his word.
Oedipus: Aye, and on thee in all humility I lay this charge: let her who lies within Receive such burial as thou shalt ordain; Such rites ’tis thine, as brother, to perform. But for myself, O never let my Thebes, The city of my sires, be doomed to bear The burden of my presence while I live. No, let me be a dweller on the hills, On yonder mount Cithaeron, famed as mine, My tomb predestined for me by my sire And mother, while they lived, that I may die Slain as they sought to slay me, when alive. This much I know full surely, nor disease Shall end my days, nor any common chance; For I had ne’er been snatched from death, unless I was predestined to some awful doom.