Page:Sophocles (Storr 1919) v2.djvu/145



Ah me! unhappy me!

Hist! from the doors a voice, my son, methought,

A wailing as of some handmaid within.

Can it be sad Electra! Shall we stay

And overhear her lamentable plaint?

Not so; we first must strive before all else

To do as Loxias bade us and thence take

Our auspices—with lustral waters lave

Thy father’s grave, thus shall we surely win

Vantage at each step, victory in the end.

[Exeunt. Enter from the palace.

O holy light,

O circumambient air,

What wailings of despair,

What sight

Have ye not witnessed in the first grey morn,

Beatings of breasts and bosoms madly torn!

By night for me is spread

No festal banquet in this haunted hall,

But my lone pallet bed.

All night I muse upon my father dead,

Not in a foreign land at Ares’ call,

But here, at home, by my own mother slain;

Her and Aegisthus, these adulterers twain;

Felled by their axe’s bloody stroke,

E’en as the woodman fells an oak. 133