Phaeton’s Sisters Transform’d into Trees – Ovid
“Heliades“ (1920s)
Rupert Bunny
______
The Latian nymphs came round him,
Latian, of Latium, a region still of Italy,
which comprised, and still comprises,
Rome, the Latians, or Latins, were its
original inhabitants, whose language,
Latin, is the root of many of our
European languages today, it is,
notably, the language of Ovid
and, amaz’d,
On the dead youth, transfix’d with thunder, gaz’d;
the dead youth, Phaeton
And, whilst yet smoaking from the bolt he lay,
His shatter’d body to a tomb convey,
And o’er the tomb an epitaph devise:
“Here he, who drove the sun’s bright chariot, lies;
His father’s fiery steeds he cou’d not guide,
But in the glorious enterprize he dy’d.”
though Ovid’s text, as translated by
John Dryden, among others, has
its difficulties, a good portion of it
is easy to understand, the secret,
mostly, is in paying attention to the
punctuation, which on occasion can
be tricky
Apollo hid his face, and pin’d for grief,
Apollo, Phaeton’s father
And, if the story may deserve belief,
The space of one whole day is said to run,
From morn to wonted ev’n, without a sun:
ev’n, evening
The burning ruins, with a fainter ray,
Supply the sun, and counterfeit a day,
A day, that still did Nature’s face disclose:
This comfort from the mighty mischief rose.
though the sun did not shine that
fateful day, the glow from the
burning debris shed a light that
allowed one to nevertheless
make out, disclose, Nature’s face,
a wry comfort midst the carnage,
midst the mighty mischief
But Clymene, enrag’d with grief, laments,
Clymene, Phaeton’s mother
And as her grief inspires, her passion vents:
Wild for her son, and frantick in her woes,
With hair dishevel’d round the world she goes,
To seek where-e’er his body might be cast;
‘Till, on the borders of the Po, at last
The name inscrib’d on the new tomb appears.
the Po, a river in Italy
the new tomb, where the Latian
nymphs lay to rest Phaeton’s
remains
The dear dear name she bathes in flowing tears,
Hangs o’er the tomb, unable to depart,
And hugs the marble to her throbbing heart.
Her daughters too lament, and sigh, and mourn
(A fruitless tribute to their brother’s urn),
And beat their naked bosoms, and complain,
And call aloud for Phaeton in vain:
All the long night their mournful watch they keep,
And all the day stand round the tomb, and weep.
Her daughters, the Heliades, along
with Phaeton, were the children of
Clymene and Helios / Phoebus /
Apollo, god of the Sun
Four times, revolving, the full moon return’d;
So long the mother and the daughters mourn’d:
the equivalent of, more or less,
four months
When now the eldest, Phaethusa, strove
To rest her weary limbs, but could not move;
Lampetia wou’d have help’d her, but she found
Her self with-held, and rooted to the ground:
Phaethusa and Lampetia, both daughters
of Helios / Phoebus / Apollo, but with
Neaera, and not, as Ovid indeed writes
in his Latin text, with Clymene, were
therefore not strictly speaking Heliades,
but stepsisters only of Phaeton
furthermore, Ovid has them find their
purported brother in the Eridanos, a
river only later identified as the Po,
so that Dryden cannot be faulted for
this not inaccurate anachronism
in either case, I suspect either’s metre
might’ve played a poetically pertinent
part in these divergences
A third in wild affliction, as she grieves,
Wou’d rend her hair, but fills her hands with leaves;
One sees her thighs transform’d, another views
Her arms shot out, and branching into boughs.
in one version, Helios / Phoebus /
Apollo and Clymene had three
daughters, Aegiale, Aegle, and
Aetheria, in another they had five,
Helia, Merope, Phoebe, Aetheria
and Dioxippe, you’ll note that
Phaethusa and Lampetia are not
among then
And now their legs, and breasts, and bodies stood
Crusted with bark, and hard’ning into wood;
But still above were female heads display’d,
And mouths, that call’d the mother to their aid.
there’s a pattern here, a friend said
when I spoke to her about what
was coming up
you mean these nymphs turning
into trees, I asked
yes, she replied
look at it the other way around, I said,
not that the girls are turning into trees,
but that the trees are becoming human,
becoming our kin, we are acknowledging
their humanity, anthropomorphically, which
is why some of us actually hug them, the
world in Ovid’s earlier myths is still being
created, not just the generic tree, but
poplars, maples, laurel, out of the share
of the common soul we impart to them,
not only metaphorically, as in these myths,
but even organically, we are, after all,
all, fundamentally, stardust
What cou’d, alas! the weeping mother do?
From this to that with eager haste she flew,
And kiss’d her sprouting daughters as they grew.
She tears the bark that to each body cleaves,
And from their verdant fingers strips the leaves:
The blood came trickling, where she tore away
The leaves and bark:
the process is not unlike watching,
helplessly, a daughter leave home,
age, take on life’s tribulations
the maids were heard to say,
“Forbear, mistaken parent, oh! forbear;
A wounded daughter in each tree you tear;
Farewell for ever.” Here the bark encreas’d,
Clos’d on their faces, and their words suppress’d.
let go, let go, the daughters cry,
holding on to us only hurts
The new-made trees in tears of amber run,
Which, harden’d into value by the sun,
Distill for ever on the streams below:
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