Phaedra

     Not such as this.  Oh, that a hunter’s chariot should uproot my sins from  my heart under the bliss of night- Oh, what did you say, Oeanea, your praise o f nightimes sin-casting ardour, you plunge my soul into a demon’s ecstacy, into the realm of the very demon of night itself.   My words follow yours into the depths of Tartarus.


                                                             Oeanea


     What have I said?  Did I inflame you mind to thoughts of Artemis’s revelries?  I apologise, my thoughts are arrows too much hewn to the curve of Artemis’s thigh, at which she presses the bow when she bends it taut against her body.  The nightime silver glistens against her skin, the skin of the naked huntress, like a coffin’s gleam, the moon sharpening its winking gaze upon her silken skin..


                                                            Phaedra


     Oh, do you torment me with visions of wildernesses, reticient in soul’s manner, of twilights shifting their pace through curtains of night?  This is the realm of Hippolytus, despiser of daylight’s cheery glean of cheery message, Hippolytus of sad midnight casts, of meloncholy philosophy, of lackadaisical whimsy of observation..


                                                            Oenea


     Hippolytus, and what is he?


                                                            Phaedra


     He is- the very weeping gash of my heart, the very motive of my mining with doeful eye into my heart’s burrowing corners, the very slant of my heart’s gaze into itself is his bow and arrow’s bent.


                                                            Oeanea


    Hippolytus, what are you saying?  Hippolytus, he is- your confession?


                                                            Phaedra


    He is the very ocean of my remorse, my passionate, weening remorse- my love’s remorse.


                                                            Oeanea


     Oh, what do you say!  Hippolytus, no!  Oh, wickedness!  To seek on ever foreign soil for oh most familiar love.  Hippolyus is a wilderness’s dream, a lover and bestower of enchantments.  He serves the naked huntress’s willl to keep in heavy-lidded privacy our dreamtime revels.  But this love for a doer of holy deeds is as a sullen, sinister whisper into your domestic closet.  He is encloacked within the cursed veneer of family.  He is a familiar visiter of your domestic haunts.  Oh, my very words are contaminated with her shadowy aftereffects of connotations.  What infection has bred in our house?