Pre-AP Theatre: "Alcyone and Ceyx" (from Metamorphoses), Pre-AP Theater

There once was a king named Ceyx who had as his queen Alcyone,
daughter of Aeolus, master of the winds. These two
adored each other and lived in a monotony of happiness.

One day Alcyone had heard that Ceyx had ordered his ship to be
made ready for a sea voyage, to visit a far-off oracle.

How can you leave me alone? I’ll pine in your absence.

Overland, it's a long and arduous trip, but I'd still prefer that
to a voyage by sea—which I fear, for my father's winds are wild and savage.

As a girl I watched them come home
exhausted and spent, and I learned to fear them then.
Now I am petrified, surely—

NARRATOR:
she said,

ALCYONE:
if you die my life is over
and I shall be cursed with every reluctant breath I draw.

My love, I hate to choose between my journey and you
but how can I live this way? Stranded on shore, afraid,
domesticated, diminished, a kind of lap dog?

For that short time, you can be brave
and endure the trial of waiting.

She was hardly consoled, but she saw she could not hold out any longer
in the face of his resolve.

And she narrowed her eyes to the horizon
and watched it as it receded to a smaller and smaller object.

And then
the whole hull was gone, and only the sails remained,
and then they, too, disappeared.

She gazed still at the empty and desolate blue
and then went to her empty bedroom to lie on the huge
and vacant bed and give herself over to weeping.

Reef the sails! Bail the water! Secure the spars!

He thinks in an oddly abstracted way that the waves are lions
crazed with hunters' wounds, or that the ship
is a besieged town attacked by a horde of madmen.

He thinks in an oddly abstracted way that the waves are lions
crazed with hunters' wounds, or that the ship
is a besieged town attacked by a horde of madmen.

HENCHMAN AND CEYX:
One would think that the heavens were crazed with lust

CEYX:
to join the turbulent sea

The men have lost their belief in their captain, their courage,
their nautical skill, and even their will to live as they wait for the end.

Another, no braver, is silent, dumbstruck.

O gods, hear my modest prayer: that my body may wash ashore at her feet
where she may with gentle hands prepare it to be buried.

Look at her, lris, she's moved her vigil down to the shore
and now she's sleeping there.

Far off in remotest Campania, beyond where the Cimmerians live
in their gloomy caves, is a deeper and even darker grotto,
the home of Sleep.

Far off in remotest Campania, beyond where the Cimmerians live
in their gloomy caves, is a deeper and even darker grotto,
the home of Sleep.

At the heart of an almost painted stillness,
in a huge, darkened chamber, the god himself relaxes,
drifting in languor.

Around him the fragments of ill-assorted
dreams hover over the floor in grand profusion like leaves
the trees have let go to float through the currents of air and fall
in their gorgeous billows below.

O Somnolent One? Somnolent One? Wake up!

CEYX, shrouded, approaches ALCYONE.

She tried to kiss him with her bill, and by some trick
of the ocean's heaving, it seemed that his head reached up to hers
in response.

But better ask, How could the gods not have felt it?
Seen this, and not had compassion?

Together they still fly, just over the water's surface,
and mate and rear their young, and for seven days each winter
Alcyone broods on her nest that floats on the gentled water—
for Aeolus, her father, then keeps the winds short reined
and every year gives seven days of calm upon the ocean—
the days we call the halcyon days.

Together they still fly, just over the water's surface,
and mate and rear their young, and for seven days each winter
Alcyone broods on her nest that floats on the gentled water—
for Aeolus, her father, then keeps the winds short reined
and every year gives seven days of calm upon the ocean—
the days we call the halcyon days.