come now, help now, avenge our father killed.
Send me my brother home. I can no longer
carry the weight of grief I am to bear.For two plays by Sophocles we have the admirable translations of W.B. Yeats, with some interesting music he
commissioned for the choral lyrics. They are the two Oedipus plays, which with the Antigone are probably the
greatest and to most people the most living of Sophocles' works. King Oedipus is an expression of such passionate
rage and grief that in modern production control of pace becomes a problem, and usually Oedipus rants. Oedipus at
Colonus, the death of the old man, goes to the heart of that mystery by which, in Greek subconscious belief,
punishment, affliction, plague, blindness, and madness are intimately linked to the special protection and the
dreadful blessing of the gods for victims: that is, to what becomes, by the degree of its affliction and degradation,
taboo and then holy, sacred, a source of benefits. This is a mystery without mechanical solutions, but one on which
social anthropology can cast much light.
Make way for Oedipus. All people said
'That is a fortunate man';
And now what storms are beating on his head?
Call no man fortunate that is not dead.
The dead are free from pain.That is how King Oedipus ends, with that slow drumbeat. In another final chorus Yeats makes the same point even
more generally. Rather interestingly it was perhaps not really written by Sophocles; it looks like a distillation of
many dark sayings from here and there in the play, strung together as the conclusion of a late production. By that
time, if not earlier, the audience expected a message, almost a sermon of tragic wisdom. It is almost equally
interesting that Yeats, who was not to know the technical arguments against the authenticity of these lines, later
adapted and re-used them as tragic wisdom of his own, as the end of a sequence of lyrics called 'A man young and
old'. They are worth quoting here as among the most Sophoclean lines ever written in English, in spite of pedantic
arguments. Some very great scholars have believed they are genuine.
Endure what life God gives and ask no longer span;
Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man;
Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain.Even from that delight memory treasures so,
Death, despair, division of families, all entanglements of mankind grow,
As that old wandering beggar and these God-hated children know.In the long echoing street the laughing dancers throng,
The bride is carried to the bridegroom's chamber through torch-light and tumultuous song;
I celebrate the silent kiss that ends short life or long.Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;
Never to have drawn the breath of life - never to have looked into the eye of day;
The second best's a gay good night and quickly turn away.Sophocles would not have given his thoughts the romantic touches that Yeats gives to these lines. If there is a
perfect Greek tragic line in English it is probably one by Webster: 'the friendless bodies of unburied men'. Yeats is