Pride breeds the tyrant:  monstrous birth!  I 2
  Insolent Pride, if idly nursed
  On timeless surfeit, plenty accursed,
Spurning the lowlier tract of Earth
Mounts to her pinnacle,—­then falls,
Dashed headlong down sheer mountain walls
To dark Necessity’s deep ground,
Where never foothold can be found. 
Let wrestlers for my country’s glory speed,
God, I thee pray!  Be God my helper in all need!

But if one be, whose bold disdain I 2
Walks in a round of vapourings vain
And violent acts, regarding not
The Rule of Right, but with proud thought
Scorning the place where Gods have set their seat,
—­Made captive by an Evil Doom,
Shorn of that inauspicious bloom,
Let him be shown the path of lawful gain
And taught in holier ways to guide his feet,
Nor with mad folly strain
His passionate arms to clasp things impious to retain. 
Who in such courses shall defend his soul
From storms of thundrous wrath that o’er him roll? 
If honour to such lives be given,
What needs our choir to hymn the power of Heaven?

No more to Delphi, central shrine II 2
Of Earth, I’ll seek, for light divine,
Nor visit Abae’s mystic fane
Nor travel o’er the well-trod plain
Where thousands throng to famed Olympia’s town,
Unless, with manifest accord,
The event fulfil the oracular word. 
Zeus, Lord of all! if to eternity
Thou would’st confirm thy kingdom’s large renown,
Let not their vauntings high
Evade the sovereign look of the everlasting eye! 
They make as though the ancient warning slept
By Laius erst with fear and trembling kept;
Apollo’s glory groweth pale,
And holiest rites are prone to faint and fail.

Enter JOCASTA.

JO.  Princes of Thebes, it came into my thought
To stand before some holy altar-place
With frankincense and garlands.  For the king,
Transported by the tempest of his fear,
Runs wild in grief, nor like a man of sense
Reasons of present things from what hath been. 
Each tongue o’ermasters him that tells of woe. 
Then since my counsels are of no avail,
To thee, for thou art nearest, Lykian God,
I bring my supplication with full hand. 
O grant us absolution and relief! 
For seeing him, our pilot, so distraught,
Like mariners, we are all amazed with dread.

Enter the CORINTHIAN SHEPHERD.

COR.  SH.  Are ye the men to tell me where to find
The mansion of the sovereign Oedipus? 
Or better, where he may himself be found?

CH.  Here is the roof you seek, and he, our lord,
Is there within:  and, stranger, thou behold’st
The queenly mother of his royal race.

COR.  SH.  May she and hers be alway fortunate! 
Still may she crown him with the joys of home!

JO.  Be thou, too, blest, kind sir!  Thy gracious tongue
Deserves no less.  But tell me what request
Or what intelligence thou bring’st with thee?