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.
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!
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.
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!
He speaks with increasing horror as he proceeds.
Oh, Loxias shall not mock12 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!13
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 horror14 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.
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.
Strophe 1
O Father, Father of Doom,15
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.
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.
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!
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.
Strophe 3
Would that in ancient days,
Father, some Lycian lance
Had slain thee by Ilion’s wall;
Then hadst thou left great praise
In thy House, and thy children’s glance
In the streets were marked of all:
Men had upreared for thee
A high-piled burial hill
In a land beyond the sea;
And the House could have borne its ill.
Antistrophe 2
And all they who nobly died
Would have loved him in that place,
And observed him in his pride
As he passed with royal pace
To a throne at the right hand
Of the Kings of the Dark Land:
For a king he was when living,
Above all who crownèd stand
With the sceptre of lawgiving.
