In verse, in music, in pantomime,
the scene lives again--the struggle in the father's heart, the
insistence of his brother chiefs, the piteous glance of the girl, and at
last the unutterable end; while above and through it all rings like a
knell of fate the refrain that is the motive of the whole drama:
"Sing woe, sing woe, but may the Good prevail."
At the conclusion of the ode enters Clytemnestra. She makes a formal
announcement to the chorus of the fall of Troy; describes the course of
the signal-fire from beacon to beacon as it sped, and pictures in
imagination the scenes even then taking place in the doomed city. On her
withdrawal the chorus break once more into song and dance. To the music
of a solemn hymn they point the moral of the fall of Troy, the certain
doom of violence and fraud descended upon Paris and his House. Once more
the vivid pictures flash from the night of woe--Helen in her fatal
beauty stepping lightly to her doom, the widower's nights of mourning
haunted by the ghost of love, the horrors of the war that followed, the
slain abroad and the mourners at home, the change of living flesh and
blood for the dust and ashes of the tomb.
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