Phedre - pg. 26

Hippolytus

No!

Now let me tell you. Now I have begun.

When paassion boils, reason evaporates.

I mean - when the heart boils, when love moves.

My secret has become unbearable.

I cannot hold it any longer.

Am I Hippolytus the arrogant?

Am I a prince? Or a king?

No, I am a beggar - to be pitied.

Not so much the exemplar of pride

As of the stupidity of pride.

I set this lofty pride against love.

I mocked her captives in their ridiculous chains,

I saw her clowns shipwrecked and I laughed

To watch their storms while I sat  safe ashore.

But now you see me,

Flotsam in that tide of the common law.

A single surge has swept me far from myself.

A single wave, and it has overwhelmed me.

It happened in a moment.

Now this famous pride is crying for help.

Desperate, humiliated,

With the arrow in me,

Sixx months of mortification,

Fighting you, fighting myself.

I search your absence for you like a madman,

And yet I run from your presence.

 Everywhere in the woods your image hunts me.

I try to escape you

But every shaft of sunlight, 

Every night shadow

Set you in front of me, surrounds me wwith you.

Everything competes to fling

The obstinate fool Hippolytus

Helpless at your feet.

All my studied care to preserve myself

Has brought me to this - I have lost myself,

I search - but I cannot find myself,

My bow, my spears, my chariot,

They beckon to me, I ignore ethem.

The breaking and taming of wild horses,

Everything the god of the sea taight me,

It is beyond me - I have forogtten it.

My own horses run wild -

They have forgotten my voice.

Nothing hears mmy voice but the forest -

The black echoing depth of the forest.

Yes, my love is  a savage.

What raving words these are!

Maybe you blush to hear them.

All I had meant to do was declare my love.

Your delicate snare has caught a strange creautre.

Princess, grant my words

Perhaps a little more than their face value.

You know this is a language alien to me.

My love speaks crely, but do not reject it.

Without you, I could never have known it.