Sunday/Oedipus

In classical Greek tragedy, the chorus, whose metrical variety is believed to derive from its lost  musical accompaniment, alternates with the spoken dialogue of the play’s heroic characters and provides both context and commentary for the developing psychological narrative. And it was with the psychological truth of the Oedipus Rex Trilogy (published in 1985) – Stephen Spender’s single-play version of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone – that the theatre critic Michael Billington was most impressed. Spender’s great achievement, in Billington’s view, had been to unify the three plays – which were originally written thirty-five years apart – by focussing on the fact that the characters are “not simply playthings of the gods but victims of their own moral blindness”. For all its mythological trappings, the chorus’ “O thrilling voice of Zeus”, one of six from the play that Spender collected as poems in their own right, is the Theban citizens’ terrified plea to the powers above not to let the mistakes of their rulers fall on their heads: “O Delian healer hear my prayer / star of hope in my night of despair”. (tls)

A Chorus From Oedipus Rex

O thrilling voice of Zeus           sent from Apollo’s golden shrine           with what intent toward us?

                    I tremble I faint I fail                    terror racks my soul

O Delian healer to whom my criesfrom this my abyss of despair arise
           what fate unknown until now           or lost in the past and renewed

drawn from the revolving years                     will you make ours?

O speak o tell us immortal voice
           To Athena daughter of Zeus    and her sister Artemis           and Apollo of burning arrows    triple guardians of Thebes

                                                   I call
If ever before in time pastyou saved us from plague and defeat
            come back to us now and save

                    The plague invades                    no knowledge saves                    birth pangs of women                    bear dead their children                    life on life sped                    to the land of the dead                    birds wing on wing                    struck down from their flying                    to the parched earth                    by the marksman death

O Delian healer hear my prayerstar of hope in my night of despair

Grant that this god who without clash of sword on shieldfills with cries of our dying Thebes he makes his battlefield

            turn back in flight from us                                               be made to yield

          driven by great gales favouring our side
to the far Thracian waters wave on wavewhere none found haven ever but his grave

            O Zeus come with thy lightning to us                                                                    save
            And come back Bacchushair gold-bound and cheeks flame-red         whom the Bacchantae worship and the maenids led         by his bright torch held high

revelling again among us Bacchus and make death  the god whom gods and men most hate lie dead
                                        
STEPHEN SPENDER (1984)