Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, ELECTRA: IMAGINARY CHARIOT RACE, by SOPHOCLES


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

ELECTRA: IMAGINARY CHARIOT RACE, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: They took their stand where the appointed judges
Last Line: To find that heritage—a tomb.
Subject(s): Chariot Racing


THEY took their stand where the appointed judges
Had cast their lots and ranged the rival cars.
Rang out the brazen trump! Away they bound!
Çheer the hot steeds and shake the slackened reins;
As with a body, the large space is filled
With the huge clangor of the rattling cars;
High whirl aloft the dust-clouds; blent together
Each presses each, and the lash rings, and loud
Snort the wild steeds, and from their fiery breath,
Along their manes, and down the circling wheels,
Scatter the flaking foam.
Orestes still,
Aye, as he swept around the perilous pillar
Last in the course, wheeled in the rushing axle,
The left rein curbed—that on the outer hand
Flung loose. So on erect the chariots rolled!
Sudden the Aenian's fierce and headlong steeds
Broke from the bit, and, as the seventh time now
The course was circled, on the Libyan car
Dashed their wild fronts: then order changed to ruin:
Car dashed on car: the wide Crissæan plain
Was, sea-like, strewn with wrecks: the Athenian saw,
Slackened his speed, and, wheeling round the marge,
Unscathed and skillful, in the midmost space,
Left the wild tumult of that tossing storm.
Behind, Orestes, hitherto the last,
Had kept back his coursers for the close;
Now one sole rival left—on, on he flew,
And the sharp sound of the impelling scourge
Rang in the keen ears of the flying steeds.
He nears—he reaches—they are side by side;
Now one—now th' other—by a length the victor.
The courses all are past—the wheels erect—
All safe—when, as the hurrying coursers round
The fatal pillar dashed, the wretched boy
Slackened the left rein. On the column's edge
Crashed the frail axle—headlong from the car,
Caught and all mesh'd within the reins, he fell;
And, masterless, the mad steeds raged along!
Loud from that mighty multitude arose
A shriek—a shout! But yesterday such deeds—
To-day such doom! Now whirled upon the earth;
Now his limbs dashed aloft, they dragged him—those
Wild horses—till, all gory, from the wheels
Released—and no man, not his nearest friends,
Could in that mangled corpse have traced Orestes.
They laid the body on the funeral pyre,
And while we speak, the Phocian strangers bear,
In a small, brazen, melancholy urn,
That handful of cold ashes, to which all
The grandeur of the beautiful have shrunk.
Within they bore him—in his father's land
To find that heritage—a tomb.





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