He Saw. And bellowing in anguish
he reached up, loosening the noose that held her.
With the poor lifeless woman laid out on the ground
this, then, was the terror we saw: he pulled
the long pins of hammered gold clasping her gown,
held them up, and punched them into his eyes,
back through the sockets. He was screaming:
"Eyes, now you will not, no, never
see the evil I suffered, the evil I caused.
You will see blackness--where once
were lives you should never have lived to see,
yearned-for faces you so long failed to know."
While he howled out these tortured words--
not once, but many times--his raised hands
kept beating his eyes. The blood kept coming,
drenching his beard and cheeks. Not a few wet drops,
but a black storm of bloody hail lashing his face.
(Oedipus the King l. 1434-50)