Racine: Phaedra

LIFE A DREAM 223
(For evil omen seldom speaks in vain)
The man-child breaking from that living tomb
That makes our birth the antitype of death,
Man-grateful, for the life she gave him paid
By killing her : and with such circumstance
As suited such unnatural tragedy
He coming into light, if light it were
That darken'd at his very horoscope,
When heaven's two champions—sun and moon I mean
Suffused in blood upon each other fell
In such a raging duel of eclipse
As hath not terrified the universe
Since that which wept in blood the death of Christ
When the dead walk'd, the waters turn'd to blood.
Earth and her cities totter'd, and the world
Seem'd shaken to its last paralysis.
In such a paroxysm of dissolution
That son of mine was born ; by that first act
Heading the monstrous catalogue of crime,
I found fore-written in his horoscope
As great a monster in man's history
As was in nature his nativity
So savage, bloody, terrible, and impious,
Who, should he live, would tear his country's entrails,
with which crime
As by his birth his mother's ;
Beginning, he should clench the dreadful tale
By trampling on his father's silver head.
All which fore-reading, and his act of birth
Fate's warrant that I read his life aright
To save his country from his mother's fate,
I gave abroad that he had died with her
His being slew : with midnight secrecy
I had him carried to a lonely tower
Hewn from the mountain-barriers of the realm.
And under strict anathema of death
Guarded from men's inquisitive approach,
Save from the trusty few one needs must trust
Who while his fasten'd body they provide
With salutary garb and nourishment.
Instruct his soul in what no soul may miss