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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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And now through thee I feel a second death. [Enter SECOND MESSENGER.] SECOND MESSENGER Most grave and reverend senators of Thebes, What Deeds ye soon must hear, what sights behold How will ye mourn, if, true-born patriots, Ye reverence still the race of Labdacus! Not Ister nor all Phasis' flood, I ween, Could wash away the blood-stains from this house, The ills it shrouds or soon will bring to light, Ills wrought of malice, not unwittingly. The worst to bear are self-inflicted wounds. CHORUS Grievous enough for all our tears and groans Our past calamities; what canst thou add? SECOND MESSENGER My tale is quickly told and quickly heard. Our sovereign lady queen Jocasta's dead. CHORUS Alas, poor queen! how came she by her death? SECOND MESSENGER By her own hand. And all the horror of it, Not having seen, yet cannot comprehend. Nathless, as far as my poor memory serves, I will relate the unhappy lady's woe. When in her frenzy she had passed inside The vestibule, she hurried straight to win The bridal-chamber, clutching at her hair With both her hands, and, once within the room, She shut the doors behind her with a crash. "Laius," she cried, and called her husband dead Long, long ago; her thought was of that child By him begot, the son by whom the sire Was murdered and the mother left to breed With her own seed, a monstrous progeny. Then she bewailed the marriage bed whereon Poor wretch, she had conceived a double brood, Husband by husband, children by her child. What happened after that I cannot tell, Nor how the end befell, for with a shriek |
