ELECTRA
Electra (within)
Ah me! unhappy me!
Aged Servant
Hist! from the doors a voice, my son, methought,
A wailing as of some handmaid within.
Orestes
Can it be sad Electra! Shall we stay
And overhear her lamentable plaint?
Aged Servant
Not so; we first must strive before all else
To do as Loxias bade us and thence take
Our auspices—with lustral waters lave
Thy father’s grave, thus shall we surely win
Vantage at each step, victory in the end.
Electra
O holy light,
O circumambient air,
What wailings of despair,
What sight
Have ye not witnessed in the first grey morn,
Beatings of breasts and bosoms madly torn!
By night for me is spread
No festal banquet in this haunted hall,
But my lone pallet bed.
All night I muse upon my father dead,
Not in a foreign land at Ares’ call,
But here, at home, by my own mother slain;
Her and Aegisthus, these adulterers twain;
Felled by their axe’s bloody stroke,
E’en as the woodman fells an oak.
