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you will perform the rites for her. For me—
never let this my father’s city have me
living a dweller in it. Leave me live
in the mountains where Cithaeron^7 is, that’s called
my mountain, which my mother and my father
while they were living would have made my tomb.
So I may die by their decree who sought
indeed to kill me. Yet I know this much:
no sickness and no other thing will kill me.
I would not have been saved from death if not
for some strange evil fate. Well, let my fate
go where it will.Creon, you need not care
about my sons; they’re men and so wherever
they are, they will not lack a livelihood.
But my two girls—so sad and pitiful—
whose table never stood apart from mine,
and everything I touched they always shared—
O Creon, have a thought for them! And most
I wish that you might suffer me to touch them
and sorrow with them.[Enter Antigone and Ismene, Oedipus’s two daughters.]
O my lord! O true noble Creon! Can I
really be touching them, as when I saw?
What shall I say?
Yes, I can hear them sobbing—my two darlings!
and Creon has had pity and has sent me
what I loved most?
Am I right?Creon. You’re right: it was I gave you this
because I knew from old days how you loved them
as I see now.Oedipus. God bless you for it, Creon,
and may God guard you better on your road
than he did me!
O children,
where are you? Come here, come to my hands,
a brother’s hands which turned your father’s eyes,
those bright eyes you knew once, to what you see,
a father seeing nothing, knowing nothing,
begetting you from his own source of life.
I weep for you—I cannot see your faces—
I weep when I think of the bitterness
there will be in your lives, how you must live- Cithaeron Greek mountain, where Oedipus was left as a baby to die by Laius and
Jocasta.
505560657075808590IL3 UNIT 3 Independent Learning • from Oedipus Rex