Page:The Dramas of Aeschylus (Swanwick).djvu/382

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Steel-smitten, hapless pair!

Steel-smitten, lie they there.

What fortune, one perchance may ask,

Awaiteth them?—A share

In their ancestral tomb.

Grief, with heart-piercing groan,

Escorts them from their home—sad task;—

Sorrow unfeigned and unfeignèd moan,

Distressful, joyless, din!

Wasteth my heart as from its depths within

True tears I shed, weeping those princes' doom.

This o'er them one may say,

O'er that unhappy twain;—

That to their friends much bale they wrought

And to the alien host,

Slaughtered in deadly fray.

Of womankind on earth,

Of all, the mother's name who boast,

Most wretched she who gave them birth;—

Wedding her son these forth she brought,

By kindred hands and mutual murder slain.

Brothers indeed together reft of life,