SONG OF THE FURIES (from "The Eumenides")
by: Aeschylus
- P and lead
the dance of Fate!
- Lift the song that mortals hate!
- Tell what rights are ours on earth,
- Over all of human birth.
- Swift of foot to avenge are we!
- He whose hands are clean and pure,
- Naught our wrath to dread hath he;
- Calm his cloudless days endure.
- But the man that seeks to hide
- Like him [1], his gore-bedewèd
hands,
- Witnesses to them that died,
- The blood avengers at his side,
- The Furies' troop forever stands.
-
- O'er our victim come begin!
- Come, the incantation sing,
- Frantic all and maddening,
- To the heart a brand of fire,
- The Furies' hymn,
- That which claims the senses dim,
- Tuneless to the gentle lyre,
- Withering the soul within.
-
- The pride of all of human birth,
- All glorious in the eye of day,
- Dishonored slowly melts away,
- Trod down and trampled to the earth,
- Whene'er our dark-stoled troop advances,
- Whene'er our feet lead on the dismal dances.
-
- For light our footsteps are,
- And perfect is our might,
- Awful remembrances of guilt and crime,
- Implacable to mortal prayer,
- Far from the gods, unhonored, and heaven's light,
- We hold our voiceless dwellings dread,
- All unapproached by living or by dead.
-
- What mortal feels not awe,
- Nor trembles at our name,
- Hearing our fate-appointed power sublime,
- Fixed by the eternal law.
- For old our office, and our fame,
- Might never yet of its due honors fail,
- Though 'neath the earth our realm in unsunned regions pale.
1
Orestes
This English translation, by Henry
Hart Milman, of 'Song of the Furies' is reprinted from Greek
Poets in English Verse. Ed. William Hyde Appleton. Cambridge:
The Riverside Press, 1893. |
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