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Heracles
O my child, where are you?
Come and take me now;
lift me up, thus, thus.
Oh, oh, my cruel fate!
It is leaping upon me, fearfully leaping!
This savage, incurable
1030sickness will be my destruction.
Pallas, ah Pallas, it strikes me again! O child, I beseech you,
pity your father: draw forth your blameless sword from its scabbard:
strike off my head and end the distress which your impious mother
gave me, to drive me insane. I only pray that she perish
soon in the very way she has caused my ruin. Sweet Hades,
1040brother of Zeus himself,
put me to sleep, to sleep,
ending my wretched life
with swift-wingèd death.
The Women of Trachis and Philoctetes. A new translation in verse by Robert Torrance. Houghton Mifflin. 1966.
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