Medea of Euripides

Thou living hate! Thou wife in every age Abhorrèd, blood-red mother, who didst kill My sons, and make me as the dead: and still Canst take the sunshine to thine eyes, and smell The green earth, reeking from thy deed of hell; I curse thee! Now, Oh, now mine eyes can see, That then were blinded, when from savagery Of eastern chambers, from a cruel land, To Greece and home I gathered in mine hand Thee, thou incarnate curse: one that betrayed Her home, her father, her . . . Oh, God hath laid Thy sins on me!—I knew, I knew, there lay A brother murdered on thy hearth that day When thy first footstep fell on Argo's hull. . . . Argo, my own, my swift and beautiful That was her first beginning. Then a wife I made her in my house. She bore to life Children: and now for love, for chambering And men's arms, she hath murdered them! A thing Not one of all the maids of Greece, not one, Had dreamed of; whom I spurned, and for mine own Chose thee, a bride of hate to me and death, Tigress, not woman, beast of wilder breath Than Skylla shrieking o'er the Tuscan sea. Enough! No scorn of mine can reach to thee, Such iron is o'er thine eyes. Out from my road, Thou crime-begetter, blind with children's blood! And let me weep alone the bitter tide That sweepeth Jason's days, no gentle bride To speak with more, no child to look upon Whom once I reared . . . all, all for ever gone!

An easy answer had I to this swell Of speech, but Zeus our father knoweth well, All I for thee have wrought, and thou for me. So let it rest. This thing was not to be, That thou shouldst live a merry life, my bed Forgotten and my heart uncomforted, Thou nor thy princess: nor the king that planned Thy marriage drive Medea from his land, And suffer not. Call me what thing thou please, Tigress or Skylla from the Tuscan seas: My claws have gripped thine heart, and all things shine.

Never! Myself will lay them in a still Green sepulchre, where Hera by the Hill Hath precinct holy, that no angry men May break their graves and cast them forth again To evil. So I lay on all this shore Of Corinth a high feast for evermore And rite, to purge them yearly of the stain Of this poor blood. And I, to Pallas' plain I go, to dwell beside Pandion's son, Aegeus.—For thee, behold, death draweth on, Evil and lonely, like thine heart: the hands Of thine old Argo, rotting where she stands, Shall smite thine head in twain, and bitter be To the last end thy memories of me.