Alkestis

Then suddenly the messenger was among them,

flung into the boiling-over

of the wedding-feast like a fresh ingredient.

They did not feel, the drinkers, the god's

secret entrance, he who held his godhead

close about him like a wet cloak

and seemed one of them, this one or that,

as he passed through. But suddenly,

mid-speech, one of the guests caught sight of

the young master of the house, high at the table,

as if torn aloft, no longer reclining,

and everywhere and with his whole being

mirroring a strangeness that addressed him terribly.

And straightaway, as though the mixture cleared,

there was silence; only with a sediment at the bottom

of murky noise and a precipitate

of falling babble, already smelling spoiled

of dull, stagnant laughter gone stale.

And then they knew the slender god,

and how he stood there, inwardly full of mission,

and inexorable,—they knew it almost.

And yet, once it was spoken, it was more

than all knowing, not to be grasped at all.

Admetos must die. When? In this very hour.

to pieces and stretched out his hands

out of it, to bargain with the god.

For years, for one single year more of youth,

for months, for weeks, for a few days,

ah, not days, for nights, only for one,

for one night, for this one only: for this.

The god said no, and then he cried out

and screamed it out and could not hold it and screamed,

as his mother cried out in giving birth.

and the father came too, the old father,

and both stood, old, outworn, at a loss,

beside the screaming man, who suddenly, as never before

so near, looked at them, broke off, swallowed, said:

Father,

do you really care so much about this remnant,

this sediment that gets in the way of your gulping?

Go, pour it out. And you, you old woman,

matron,

what are you still doing here: you have given birth.

And he held them both like sacrificial beasts

in a single grip. All at once he let go

and thrust the old ones away, full of a sudden idea, radiant

and drawing breath, calling: Kreon, Kreon!

And nothing but that; and nothing but this name.

But in his face stood the other thing,

which he did not say, awaiting it namelessly,

as he, glowing, held it out across the cluttered table

to the young friend, the beloved.

they are used up and bad and nearly worthless,

but you, you, in all your beauty—

He stayed behind, and what came was she,

a little smaller, almost, than he had known her,

and light and sad in the pale bridal gown.

All the others are only her lane,

through which she comes and comes—: (in a moment she will be there

in his arms, which painfully open).

Yet as he waits, she speaks; not to him.

She speaks to the god, and the god hears her,

and all of them hear it, as it were, only in the god:

I am the substitute. For no one is at an end,

the way I am. For what is left to me of

what I was here? That is just it, that I am dying.

Did she not tell you, when she charged you with it,

that the bed that waits in there

belongs to the underworld? I have taken my leave.

Farewell upon farewell.

No dying person takes more of it than I. I went,

so that all of it, buried beneath which

the one who is now my husband—may decay, dissolve—.

Like this, away into myself: for I die for him.

so the god stepped, almost as to a dead woman,

and was all at once far from her husband,

to whom he, hidden within a small sign,

tossed the hundred lives of this earth.

He lurched, reeling, toward the two of them

and grasped at them as if in a dream. They were already

moving toward the entrance, in which the women

crowded, tear-stained. But once

he saw once more the girl's face, which turned

with a smile, bright as a hope,

that was almost a promise: grown,

to come back out of the deep death

to him, the living one—

his hands before his face, as he knelt there,

so as to see nothing more after that smile.