Electra: Stranger! It is a plot thou lay’st for me!
Orestes: Against mine own dear life that plot would be.
Electra: Thou mock’st me! Thou would’st laugh to hear me moan!
Orestes: Who mocks thy tribulation mocks mine own.
Electra: My heart half dares foretell that thou art he …
Orestes: Nay, when I face thee plain thou wilt not see! Oh, seeing but that shorn tress of funeral hair Thy soul took wings and seemed to hold me there; Then peering in my steps … thou knew’st them mine, Thy brother’s, moulded feet and head like thine. Set the lock here, where it was cut. Behold This cloak I wear, thy woven work of old, The battened ridges and the broidered braid Of lions … Electra throws herself into his arms. Hold! Ah, be not all dismayed With joy! Our nearest is our deadliest foe.
Electra: O best beloved, O dreamed of long ago, Seed of deliverance washed with tears as rain, By thine own valour thou shalt build again Our father’s House! O lightener of mine eyes, Four places in my heart, four sanctities, Are thine. My father in thy face and mien Yet living: thine the love that might have been My mother’s—whom I hate, most righteously— And my poor sister’s, fiercely doomed to die, And thou my faithful brother, who alone Hast cared for me. … O Victory, be our own This day, with Justice who doth hold us fast, And Zeus most high, who saveth at the last!
Orestes: O Zeus, O Zeus, look down on our estate! Hast seen thine eagle’s brood left desolate, The father in the fell toils overborne Of some foul serpent, and the young forlorn And starved with famine, still too weak of wing To bear to the nest their father’s harvesting? Even so am I, O Zeus, and even so This woman, both disfathered long ago, Both to one exile cast, both desolate.
He was thy worshipper, thy giver great Of sacrifice. If thou tear down his nest, What hand like his shall glorify thy feast? Blot out the eagle’s brood, and where again Hast thou thy messenger to speak to men? Blast this most royal oak, what shade shall cool Thine altars on the death-day of the Bull? But cherish us, and from a little seed Thou shalt make great a House now fallen indeed.
Leader: O Children, Saviours of your father’s House, Be silent! Children, all is perilous; And whoso hears may idly speak of ye To our masters; whom may I yet live to see Dead where the pine logs ooze in fragrant fire!
Orestes: He speaks with increasing horror as he proceeds.
Oh, Loxias shall not mock my great desire, Who spoke his divine promise, charging me To thread this peril to the extremity: Yea, raised his awful voice and surging told To my hot heart of horrors stormy-cold Till I seek out those murderers, by the road Themselves have shown—so spake he—blood for blood, In gold-rejecting rage, the wild bull’s way! If not, for their offending I must pay
With mine own life, in torment manifold. Of many things that rise from earth he told, To appease the angry dead: yea, and strange forms, On thee and me, of savage-fangèd worms, Climbing the flesh; lichens, which eat away Even unto nothingness our natural clay. And when they leave him, a man’s hair is white. For him that disobeys, he said, the night Hath Furies, shapen of his father’s blood;
Clear-seen, with eyeball straining through the hood Of darkness. The blind arrows of dead men Who cried their kin for mercy and were slain, And madness, and wild fear out of the night, Shall spur him, rack him, till from all men’s sight Alone he goes, out to the desert dim, And that bronze horror clanging after him!
For such as he there is no mixing bowl, No dear libation that binds soul to soul: From every altar fire the unseen rage Outbars him: none shall give him harbourage, Nor rest beneath one roof with such an one; Till, without worship, without love, alone He crawls to his death, a carcase to the core Through-rotted, and embalmed to suffer more. Collecting himself.
So spake he … God, and is one to believe Such oracles as these? Nay, though I give No credence, the deed now must needs be done. So many things of power work here as one: The God’s command; grief for my father slain; And mine own beggary urgeth me amain, That never shall these Argives, famed afar, High conquerors of Troy in joyous war Cower to … two women. For he bears, I know, A woman’s heart. … If not, this day will show. He kneels at the Grave: Electra kneels opposite him and the Chorus gather behind.
Chorus: Ye great Apportionments of God, The road of Righteousness make straight: “For tongue of hate be tongue of hate Made perfect”: thus, as falls her rod, God’s justice crieth: “For the blow Of death the blow of death atone.” “On him that doeth shall be done”: Speaks a grey word of long ago.
Orestes: Strophe 1
O Father, Father of Doom, What word, what deed from me, Can waft afar to the silent room Where thy sleep holdeth thee A light that shall rend thy gloom? Yet surely, the tale is told, That tears are comfort beneath the tomb To the great Kings of old.
Leader: Strophe 2
No fire ravening red, O Son, subdueth quite The deep life of the dead; His wrath breaks from the night. When they weep for one who dies His Avenger doth arise, Yea, for father and life-giver There is Justice, when the cries And the tears run as a river.
Electra: Antistrophe 1
O Father, hearken and save, For my sore sorrow’s sake! Children twain are above thy grave Seeking for thee: Oh, wake! Thy grave is their only home, The beggared and outcast. What here is well? What is saved from doom? O Atê strong to the last!
Chorus: Yet still it may be—God is strong— A changèd music shall be born To sound above this dirge forlorn, And the King’s House with Triumph-song Lead home a Friend in love new-sworn.
Orestes: Strophe 3