Echo and Narcissus But something glassy about it, a pride. Kept all his admirers at a distance. None dared be familiar, let alone touch him.

When the prophetic vision awoke A day came, out on the mountain Behind the blind eyes of Tiresias Narcissus was driving and netting and killing the deer And stared into the future, When Echo saw him.

The first to test how deeply he saw Echo who cannot be silent And how lucidly When another speaks. Echo who cannot Was Liriope, a swarthy nymph of the fountain. Speak at all Unless another has spoken. She was swept off her feet by the river Cephisus Echo, who always answers back. Who rolled her into the bed of a dark pool. Then cast her up on the shingle pregnant. In those days, this nymph was more than a voice. She had a pretty body. The boy she bore, even in his cradle. But her prattle was the same - Had a beauty that broke hearts. Never anything more She named this child Narcissus. Gossips Than the last word or two, the tail end Of what she heard uttered by others. Came to Tiresias: 'Can her boy live long Which she repeated over and over. With such perfect beauty?' The seer replied: 'Yes, unless he learns to know himself.' Juno had stricken her With this odd affliction. All regarded these words as a riddle - When Juno, following a tip-off. Till time solved them with a strange madness. Would be stalking Jupiter, to catch him A stranger death completed the explanation. In some dell, with a nymph. Echo made it her duty In his sixteenth year Narcissus, To engage the goddess in an unending Still a slender boy but already a man. Rigmarole of chatter. Till the nymph Infatuated many. His beauty had flowered. Had pleased the god enough To be let go. Echo did this so often.

[74] ECHO AND NARCISSUS [75] And so artfully, Juno Narcissus looked around wildly. In a rage turned on her: 'Your tongue 'I'll stay here,' he shouted. Has led me in such circles. 'You come to me.' And 'Come to me,' Henceforth Shouted Echo. 'Come to me. It will have to trail To me, to me, to me.' Helplessly after others, uttering Narcissus stood baffled. Only the last words, helplessly. Whether to stay or go. He began to run, Of what you last heard.' Calling as he ran: 'Stay there.' But Echo Cried back, weeping to utter it, 'Stay there, The moment Echo saw Narcissus Stay there, stay there, stay there.' She was in love. She followed him Narcissus stopped and listened. Then, more quietly, Like a starving wolf 'Let's meet halfway. Come.' And Echo Following a stag too strong to be tackled. Eagerly repeated it: 'Come.' And like a cat in winter at a fire She could not edge close enough But when she emerged from the undergrowth To what singed her, and would bum her. Her expression pleading. She almost burst Her arms raised to embrace him. With longing to call out to him and somehow Narcissus turned and ran. Let him know what she felt. 'No,' he cried 'no, I would sooner be dead But she had to wait Than let you touch me.' Echo collapsed in sobs. For some other to speak As her voice lurched among the mountains: So she could snatch their last words 'Touch me, touch me, touch me, touch me.' With whatever sense they might lend her. Echo moped under the leaves. It so happened, Narcissus Humiliated, she hid Had strayed apart In the deep woods. From that day From his companions. Like a hurt lynx, for her He hallooed them: 'Where are you? Any cave was a good home. I'm here.' And Echo But love was fixed in her body Caught at the syllables as if they were precious: Like a barbed arrow. There it festered 'I'm here,' she cried, 'I'm here' and 'I'm here' and T With his rejection. Sleeplessly here.' She brooded over the pain. Wasting away as she suffered.

[76] ECHO AND NARCISSUS [77] The petal of her beauty And though the arching trees kept it cool Fading and shrivelling, falling from her - No twigs rotted in it, and no leaves. Leaving her voice and bones. Her bones, they say, turned Weary with hunting and the hot sun Into stone, sinking into the humus. Narcissus found this pool. Her voice roamed off by itself, Gratefully he stretched out full length. Unseen in the forest, unseen To cup his hands in the clear cold On the empty mountainside - And to drink. But as he drank Though all could hear it A strange new thirst, a craving, unfamiliar. Living the only life left to Echo. Entered his body with the water. And entered his eyes Narcissus had rebuffed her adoration With the reflection in the limpid mirror. As he had the passionate attentions He could not believe the beauty Of many another nymph of the wilderness Of those eyes that gazed into his own. And many another man. As the taste of water flooded him One of these, mocked and rejected. So did love. So he lay, mistaking Lifted his hands to heaven: That picture of himself on the meniscus 'Let Narcissus love and suffer For the stranger who could make him happy. As he has made us suffer. Let him, like us, love and know it is hopeless. He lay, like a fallen garden statue. And let him, like Echo, perish of anguish.' Gaze fixed on his image in the water, Nemesis, the corrector. Comparing it to Bacchus or Apollo, Heard this prayer and granted it. Falling deeper and deeper in love With what so many had loved so hopelessly. There was a pool of perfect water. Not recognising himself No shepherd had ever driven sheep He wanted only himself. He had chosen To trample the margins. No cattle From all the faces he had ever seen Had slobbered their muzzles in it Only his own. He was himself And befouled it. No wild beast The torturer who now began his torture. Had ever dashed through it. No bird had ever paddled there preening and bathing. He plunged his arms deep to embrace Only surrounding grasses drank its moisture One who vanished in agitated water. Again and again he kissed

(78] ECHO AND NARCISSUS [79] The lips that seemed to be rising to kiss his Neither by seas nor mountains But dissolved, as he touched them, Nor the locked-up gates of cities. Into a soft splash and a shiver of ripples. Nothing at all comes between us - How could he clasp and caress his own reflection? Only the skin of water. And still he could not comprehend He wants my love as I want his. What the deception was, what the delusion. As I lean to kiss him He simply became more excited by it. He lifts up his face to kiss me - Poor misguided boy! Why clutch so vainly Why can't I reach him? Why can't he reach me? At such a brittle figment? What you hope In that very touch of the kiss To lay hold of has no existence. We vanish from each other - he vanishes Look away and what you love is nowhere. Into the skin of water. This is your own shadow. It comes with you. While you stay it stays. 'Who are you? Come out. Come up So it will go Onto the land. I never saw beauty To compare with yours. Oh why do you always When you go - if ever you can go. Dodge away at the last moment And leave me with my arms full of nothing He could not go. But water and the memory of an image. He wanted neither to eat nor to sleep. It cannot be my ugliness Only to lie there - eyes insatiably Or my age that repels you. Gazing into the eyes that were no eyes. If all the nymphs are so crazy about me. This is how his own eyes destroyed him. Your face is full of love He sat up, and lifting his arms As your eyes look into my eyes Called to the forest: 'You trees. I see it, and my hope shakes me. Was there ever a love I stretch my arms to you, you stretch yours As cruel as mine is to me? As eagerly to me. You laugh when I laugh. You aged voyeurs, you eavesdroppers. I have watched your tears through my tears. Among all the lovers who have hidden When I tell you my love I see your lips Under your listening leaves Seeming to tell me yours - though I cannot hear it. Was there ever a love As futureless as mine? 'You are me. Now I see that. What I love is untouchable. I see through my own reflection. We are kept apart But it is too late.

[80] ECHO AND NARCISSUS [81] I am in love with myself. The skin flushed under the blows. I tortvire myself. What am I doing - When Narcissus saw this Loving or being loved? In the image returned to perfection What can my courtship gain? Where the pool had calmed - What I want, I am. It was too much for him. But being all that I long for - Like wax near the flame. That is my destitution. Or like hoar-frost Why can't I get apart from my body? Where the first ray of the morning sun This is a new kind of lover's prayer. Creeps across it. To wish himself apart from the one he loves. He melted - consumed By his love. 'This impotent grief Like Echo's the petal of his beauty Is taking my strength Faded, shrivelled, fell - And my life. He disappeared from his own eyes. My beauty is in full bloom - Till nothing remained of the body But I am a cut flower. That had driven Echo to distraction. Let death come quickly - Carry me off Echo was watching all this misery. Where this pain Remembering how it happened before Can never follow. To her, when he ran from her. The one I loved should be let live - Her anger blazed He should live on after me, blameless. But her pity smothered it. But when I go - both go.' And when he moaned, 'Alas,' she wept. And groaned. 'Alas.' His last words, Then Narcissus wept into the pool. As he gazed into the dark pool, His tears shattered the still shrine 'Farewell, you incomparable boy, And his image blurred. I have loved you in vain' He cried after it: 'Don't leave me. Returned from her lips with sorrow doubled: If I cannot touch you at least let me see you. 'I have loved you in vain.' Let me noiuish my starving, luckless love - And after his last 'Farewell' If only by looking.' Came her last 'Farewell.' Then he ripped off his shirt. He pillowed his head on the grass. And beat his bare chest with white fists.

[82] ECHO AND NARCISSUS [83] So finally death Erisychthon Closed the eyes that had loved themselves too much.

When he entered the Land of the Dead Narcissus could not resist it - Some are transformed just once He ran straight to the banks of the Styx And live their whole lives after in that shape. And gazed down at the smear of his shadow Others have a facility Trembling on the fearful current. For changing themselves as they please. His sisters, the nymphs of the fountains, Cropped their hair and mourned him Proteus, who haunts the shadowy seas In a lamenting song - and far off. That scarf this earth, is glimpsed as a young man Wandering heartbroken among the hills Who becomes of a sudden a lion Echo sang the refrain. That becomes a wild boar ripping the ground.

When men came with timber Yet flows forward, hidden, through grass, without To build a pyre, and with crackling torches sound For the solemnity As a serpent, that emerges That would reduce Narcissus As a towering bull under down-bent horns, To a handful of dust in an um - Or hides, among stones, a simple stone. No corpse could be found. But there, in the pressed grass where he had perished, Or stands as a tree alone. A tall flower stood unbroken - Or liquefies, and collapses, shapeless. Bowed, a ruff of white petals Into water, a pouring river. Sometimes Round a dainty bugle centre He is the river's opposite - fire. Yellow as egg yolk. Another with a similar power Yes, it was this quiet woodland flower Was Erisychthon's daughter. Trumpeted the fame of Tiresias The wife of Autolycus. Her father Throughout Achaia. Gave to the gods nothing but mockery.

Without a qualm he cut down every tree In the sacred grove of Ceres -

[84] ECHO AND NARCISSUS [85]