(Str. 2)
          O heavy hand of fate! 
          Who now more desolate,
Whose tale more sad than thine, whose lot more dire? 
          O Oedipus, discrowned head,
          Thy cradle was thy marriage bed;
One harborage sufficed for son and sire. 
How could the soil thy father eared so long
Endure to bear in silence such a wrong?

(Ant. 2)
          All-seeing Time hath caught
          Guilt, and to justice brought
The son and sire commingled in one bed. 
          O child of Laius’ ill-starred race
          Would I had ne’er beheld thy face;
I raise for thee a dirge as o’er the dead. 
Yet, sooth to say, through thee I drew new breath,
And now through thee I feel a second death.
[Enter second messenger.]

Second messenger
Most grave and reverend senators of Thebes,
What Deeds ye soon must hear, what sights behold
How will ye mourn, if, true-born patriots,
Ye reverence still the race of Labdacus! 
Not Ister nor all Phasis’ flood, I ween,
Could wash away the blood-stains from this house,
The ills it shrouds or soon will bring to light,
Ills wrought of malice, not unwittingly. 
The worst to bear are self-inflicted wounds.

Chorus
Grievous enough for all our tears and groans
Our past calamities; what canst thou add?

Second messenger
My tale is quickly told and quickly heard. 
Our sovereign lady queen Jocasta’s dead.

Chorus
Alas, poor queen! how came she by her death?

Second messenger
By her own hand.  And all the horror of it,
Not having seen, yet cannot comprehend. 
Nathless, as far as my poor memory serves,
I will relate the unhappy lady’s woe. 
When in her frenzy she had passed inside
The vestibule, she hurried straight to win
The bridal-chamber, clutching at her hair
With both her hands, and, once within the room,
She shut the doors behind her with a crash. 
“Laius,” she cried, and called her husband dead
Long, long ago; her thought was of that child
By him begot, the son by whom the sire
Was murdered and the mother left to breed
With her own seed, a monstrous progeny. 
Then she bewailed the marriage bed whereon
Poor wretch, she had conceived a double brood,
Husband by husband, children by her child. 
What happened after that I cannot tell,
Nor how the end befell, for with a shriek
Burst on us Oedipus; all eyes were fixed
On Oedipus, as up and down he strode,
Nor could we mark her agony to the end. 
For stalking to and fro “A sword!” he cried,
“Where is the wife, no wife, the teeming womb
That bore a double harvest, me and mine?”
And in his frenzy some supernal power
(No mortal, surely, none of us who watched him)
Guided his footsteps; with a terrible shriek,
As though one beckoned him, he crashed against