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Hades orpheus and eurydice song8/31/2023 He swore to travel to Hades and return with his beloved Eurydice. Its timbers creaked in sympathy and tears stained its oak prow.īut now Orpheus changed key again, adopting a tone of firm resolve as he sang of how he rejected the cards that fate had dealt him. Tears ran down their battle-scarred cheeks, and the ship was filled with the sound of sobbing. He played the song he had sung at the time, echoing his former lament, and the Argonauts wept like children as they heard Orpheus rehearse his sorrow. So he started up again in a more sombre mood, telling how he found his beloved Eurydice dead by the roots of a tree and how his brother asked in vain for his forgiveness. Orpheus stopped, unable to continue, but the Argonauts begged him to go on. But Eurydice hid in the hollows of the roots of a tree by the banks of a slow-moving stream, home, as it happened, to a venomous snake who bit Eurydice's white ankle and killed her, sending her spirit down to Hades' halls. Orpheus was describing how Eurydice went one day to visit his half-brother, Aristaeus, king of beekeepers, and how Aristaeus was seized with lust for his sister-in-law, disdainful of the vows of marriage how he fed her a spoonful of honey and kissed her sweet lips how Eurydice fled, with Aristaeus chasing after her, seized with belated regretfulness, pleading with her to forgive his indiscretion and not to tell Orpheus what had happened. Orpheus conjured up the sound of buzzing on his lyre, as his fingers ran up and down the instrument, and all the Argonauts ducked, thinking they were under attack from a swarm of bees. The Argonauts were full of fear for what the music portended. Next Orpheus changed to a minor key and the pace picked up once more. How he paused from his song to sing out "Will you marry me?" and how Eurydice sang "I will, my love, I will." The song reached its sublimest note when Orpheus told how he smiled at Eurydice and how she smiled back. He told how he fell in love with Eurydice when he saw her dancing to his music, her legs flashing out from under her skirts, with speed and daring. Then Orpheus picked up the tempo and sang of a country dance of country people gathered to honour country gods: all the nymphs of springs and rivers and goat-legged Pan. Even the trees of the high mountains shifted in the soil and gradually edged closer to the music, until they stood in a circle, like an audience at a concert, making not the slightest rustle, shushing their own leaves. Wolves left off the pursuit of deer, which stopped running from their pursuers and lay down around Orpheus, enchanted by his voice. All the animals of the forest came to listen to him. Orpheus sang first of his birth, of how the god Apollo came to the muse Calliope and enjoyed the delights of love with her, how he was reared on the mountain slopes of Thrace, how Apollo, gave him a lyre on his 18th birthday, the same instrument he had himself once taken from Hermes in fair exchange, and how he discovered the power of music on a pleasant afternoon in a rocky glade.
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