What say you, sir?

Tell your own tale yourself.

MESSENGER

If first of all

I must deliver this for certainty,

Know well, that he has gone the way of mortals.

OEDIPUS

Was it by treason, or some chance disease?

MESSENGER

A little shock prostrates an aged frame!

OEDIPUS

Sickness, you mean, was my poor father’s end?

MESSENGER

Yes, and old age; his term of life was full.

OEDIPUS

Heigh ho! Why, wife! why should a man regard

The oracular hearth of Pytho, or the birds

Cawing above us, by whose canons I

Was to have slain my father? He is dead,

And buried out of sight; and here am I,

Laying no finger to the instrument,

(Unless, indeed, he pined for want of me,

And so, I killed him!) Well, Polybus is gone;

And with him all those oracles of ours

Bundled to Hades, for old songs, together!

JOCASTA

Did I not say so all along?

OEDIPUS

You did;

But I was led astray by fear.

JOCASTA

Well, now

Let none of these predictions any more

Weigh on your mind!

OEDIPUS

And how can I help dreading

My mother’s bed?

JOCASTA

But why should men be fearful,

O’er whom Fortune is mistress, and foreknowledge

Of nothing sure? Best take life easily,

As a man may. For that maternal wedding,

Have you no fear; for many men ere now

Have dreamed as much; but he who by such dreams

Sets nothing, has the easiest life of it.

OEDIPUS

All these things would have been well said of you,

Were not my mother living still; but now,

She being alive, there is all need of dread;

Though you say well.

JOCASTA

And yet your father’s burial

Lets in much daylight!

OEDIPUS

I acknowledge, much.

Still, her who lives I fear.

MESSENGER

But at what woman

Are you dismayed?

OEDIPUS

At Merope, old man,

The wife of Polybus.

MESSENGER

And what of her

Causes you terror?

OEDIPUS

A dark oracle,

Stranger, from heaven.

MESSENGER

May it be put in words?

Or is it wrong another man should know it?

OEDIPUS

No, not at all. Why, Loxias declared

That I should one day marry my own mother,

And with my own hands shed my father’s blood.

Wherefore from Corinth I have kept away

Far, for long years; and prospered; none the less

It is most sweet to see ones parents’ face.

MESSENGER

And in this apprehension you became

An emigrant from Corinth?

OEDIPUS

And, old man,

Desiring not to be a parricide.

MESSENGER

Why should I not deliver you, my liege—

Since my intent in coming here was good—

Out of this fear?

OEDIPUS

Indeed you would obtain

Good guerdon from me.

MESSENGER

And indeed for this

Chiefest I came, that upon your return

I might in some sort benefit.

OEDIPUS

But I

Will never go, to meet my parents there!

MESSENGER

O son, ’tis plain you know not what you do!

OEDIPUS

How so old man? in Heaven’s name tell me!

MESSENGER

If