Oedipus Rex

Vision/Blindness Imagery

Your eyes / Must tell you (25-26)

Teiresias: see: student of mysteries (287)
Of all that’s taught and all that no man tells,
Secrets of Heaven and secrets of the earth:
Blind though you are, you know the city lies
Sick with plague; and from this plague, my lord,
We find that you alone can guard or save us. (287-292)

You planned it, you had it done, you all but
Killed him with your own hands: if you had eyes,
I’d say the crime was yours, and yours alone. (331-333)

Why, he is no more clairvoyant than I am! (375)

We can not see that his words or yours
Have been spoken except in anger, Oedipus (390-391)

You mock my blindness, do you?
But I say that you, with both your eyes, are blind:
You cannot see the wretchedness of your life,
Nor in whose house you live, no, nor with whom.
Who are your father and mother? Can you tell me?
You do not even know the blind wrongs
That you have done them, on earth and in the world below.
But the double lash of your parents’ curse will whip you
Out of this land some day, with only night
Upon your precious eyes. (398-407)

Out of this place! Out of my sight! (419)

A blind man,
Who has his eyes now; a penniless man, who is rich now;
And he will go tapping the strange earth with his staff.

No man can judge that rough unknown or trust in second sight,
For wisdom changes hands among the wise. (479-480)

Light/Darkness Imagery

Then once more I must bring what is dark to light (134)

What oracle for Thebes, the sun-whipped city? (156)

Will you send doom like a sudden cloud, or weave it / Like nightfall of the past? (159-160)

The fires of our grief, the fires of darkness (168)

Like sparks that fly when a fire soars,
To the shore of the god of evening (178-179)

Let him be riven by lightning from heaven! (195)

Phoibos Apollo, stretch the sun’s bowstring (196)

Artemis, Huntress,
Race with flaring lights upon our mountains! (198-199)

For the son of Zeus armed with this father’s thunder
Leaps in lightning after him (455-456)

Mixing of the Two Dominant Images

Come with blinding torches, come in joy! (203)

You child of total night! I would not touch you;
Neither would any man who sees the sun. (359-360)

Holy Parnassos’ peak of snow
Flashes and blinds that secret man,
That all shall hunt him down (458-460)