I am posting this early, so the commenters don't kill me.

Oh Oedipus, Oedipus, Oedipus Rex
Fated to kill his father, and with his mother have sex
And now his sister is also his daughter
What that is like, I cannot even guess.

The young man became king after solving a riddle
Given by the Sphinx: he knew adulthood came in the middle
He succeeded Laius, who was in fact his father,
And he led the Thebeians both with strength and with valor

Until a plague struck the city of Thebes,
And our hero, with hubris, said he’d end the disease
He sent his brother-in-law Creon, who was also his uncle
To travel to Delphi, and discover the source of the junk-le

So Uncle Creon talked to the god Apollo,
Whose advice Oedipus knew he surely should follow
Until he found out Apollo called him a killer
Which is when Sophocles turns it into a thriller.

Oedipus, disbelieving, demanded the truth
So he could clear his own name and stop saying “forsooth!”
He sent Uncle Creon, apparently a slave
To send for Tereisias, whose vision was grave

Indeed the prophet was blind, whereas Oedipus saw
But on his side most surely wasn’t the law
At first the blind man refused to say what he knew,
But Oedipus insisted to hear what was true

Though the prophet insisted the truth would hurt,
He had to follow the orders of his king, who was becoming quite curt.
So he told him the truth: what the oracle said,
Yet Oedipus was left there just scratching his head

At what it could mean, at all of these lies
So he called in Jocasta, his mother and wife
And he asked her to tell him all that she knew
About the day his father had been beaten in two

She knew that it happened where three roads converged
And it was here that her story and Oedipus’s did merge
For he too had been there, one night years ago,
And there he had taken others’ lives, to protect his own.

Once he conquered the Sphinx and became Thebes’s king,
He did what was right and gave Jocasta a ring,
Yet it was not right, for she was his mother
And with her he did give birth to his own sisters and brothers.

What lessons can be learned from Oedipus’s tragic tale?
When one tries to avoid fate, one often fails
Yet the choices one makes will affect his whole life
Just make better choices than choosing your mom to be your wife.

Will you scratch by back? I think I have an Ilych!

Leo Tolstoy’s novella “The Death of Ivan Ilych” is an unusual piece of literature in many ways. It begins with the ending; over half the novel is about the protagonists death, not his life; only one of the characters, Gerasim, is an exemplary person; and universal themes such as love and happiness are virtually absent. Yet my favorite part of the novella is the mastery with which Tolstoy depicts one’s life as foreshadowing one’s death. The protagonist and title character, Ivan Ilych, leads a shallow, artificial life. When he gets married, the speaker points out, “Ivan Ilych might have aspired to a more brilliant match, but even this was good. He had his salary, and she, he hoped, would have an equal income” (70). Ilych’s marriage is based on little more than money, and his wife demonstrates this too at his funeral when Peter Ivanovich realizes that “her chief concern with him—namely, to question him as to how she could obtain a grant of money from the government on the occasion of her husband’s death” (47). Ilych gets as little enjoyment out of his job as he does from his marriage, and each has the same motivation for him: money. When he gets promoted to examining magistrate, he feels that “everyone without exception, even the most important and self-satisfied, was in his power…” (65). When he is promoted again to Assistant Public Prosecutor, “His new duties, their importance, the possibility of indicting and imprisoning anyone he chose, the publicity his speeches received, and the success he had in all these things, made his work still more attractive” (79). Yet never does he take a job for the joy that it gives him, nor does he often show compassion towards his wife and his seldom-mentioned children. He has no “friends,” only “acquaintances.” And all of this is reflected in his death: just as monotonous, lonely, and tragic as his life. As he is dying, “He began to recall the best moments of his pleasant life. But strange to say none of those best moments of his pleasant life now seemed at all what they had seemed…all that had then seemed joys now melted before his sight and turned into something trivial and often nasty” (301). He realizes that his death is monotonous: the doctor comes, Ilych refuses to take the medication, his wife comes in to visit, Ilych kicks her out, Gerasim lends his body to rest Ilych’s legs, and Ilych finally realizes what kindness and happiness is, as it is reflected in Gerasim. He realizes, “’Just as the pain went on getting worse and worse, so my life grew worse and worse’” (313). Indeed, his life and death followed similar trajectories, both ending in much pain and sorrow.