devohoneybee: (Default)
devohoneybee ([personal profile] devohoneybee) wrote2005-09-23 01:37 pm

not shakespeare...

...but it is the classics.

When you see this, post something classical.

from Antigone, by Sophocles (Translated by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald)

Ode 1

[Strophe 1]

Numberless are the world's wonders, but none
More wonderful than man; the stormgray sea
Yields to his prows, the huge crests bear him high;
Earth, holy and inexhaustible, is graven
With shining furrows where his plows have gone
Year after year, the timeless labor of stallions.

[Antistrophe 1]

The lightboned birds and beasts that cling to cover,
The lithe fish lighting their reaches of dim water,
All are taken, tamed in the net of his mind;
The lion on the hill, the wild horse windy-maned,
Resign to him; and his blunt yoke has broken
The sultry shoulders of the mountain bull.

[Strophe 2]

Words also, and thought as rapid as air,
He fashions to his good use; statecraft is his,
And his the skill that deflects the arrows of snow,
the spears of winter rain: from every wind
He has made himself secure--from all but one:
In the late wind of death he cannot stand.