And now to crown my grief

Comes a new woe,

My leader Ajax, mad beyond relief,

By heaven laid low;

How fallen from that impetuous chief,

Who sailed to meet the foe.

Now, to his friends’ distress,

He sits and broods in sullen loneliness;

Those doughty deeds his right hand wrought

Now count for naught,

And from that loveless pair, those men of sin,

No love but despite win.

Ah, when his mother, blanched with age and frail

Hears of his shattered reason, what wild wail

Will she upraise, a dirge of shrill despair,

(No plaintive ditty of the nightingale)

With beating of the breast and rending of white hair.

Better be buried with the dead

Who lives with brain bewilderèd.

Of all the Greeks toil-worn

Behold the noblest born,

Now from his native temper warped and strange,

Whose thoughts in alien paths distracted range.

O wretched father, what a curse ’tis thine

Upon thy son to hear⁠—curse that on none

E’er fell of all the Aeacidae’s great line

Save him alone.

Time in its slow, illimitable course

Brings all to light and buries all again;

Strange things it brings to pass, the dreadest oath

Is broken and the stubbornest will is bent.