Echo and Narcissist

     

Gently the day has passed in a sustained

Low hum of harmony.  The brain is drained

And a brown ament, and the noun I meant

To use but did not, dry on the cement.

Maybe my sensual love for the consonne

D’appui, Echo’s fey child is based upon

A feeling of fantastically planned,

Richly rhymed life.

Canto 4: Line 963-970

            In Ovid’s Metamorphoses Echo is portrayed as a mountain nymph who loved the sound of her own voice.  For this reason, Jove gave her the role of distracting his wife Juno with her chatter while Jove courted the other mountain nymphs.  Inevitably Juno discovered this deception he cursed Echo stating “the tongue that made a fool of me will shortly have shorter use, the voice be brief hereafter.”  With these words, Echo was forevermore doomed to only voice repeated words of another person and nothing more.  One day as Echo was wandering through the woods she happened upon a beautiful hunter named Narcissus and fell madly in love.  Narcissus was the son of the river naiad Liriope and the river-god Cephisus and was foreseen by the seer Tiresias to live to a ripe old age.  However, this was only under the circumstances that he should never know himself.  

            Desperate to interact with her love but not being capable to initiate the conversation Echo awaited patiently for the moment when Narcissus became separated from his companions.  As Narcissus called out “is anybody here?” Echo replied, repeating his words.  This mirror conversation continued until Echo broke out of the woods and flung herself onto him.  Narcissus denied her and retreated calling out “I would die before I give you a chance at me.”  Poor Echo heartbroken still clung to her love of the hunter and pined for him incapable to sleep or eat.  Echo’s body diminished-her bones turned to stone and her voice became the only fragment of her being that continued to exist restricted from the mountains and forever hiding in the woods. 

            Narcissus however continued to deny any creature that threw his or her heart to him.  One day a slighted admirer prayed to the Gods asking, “May Narcissus Love one day, so himself, and not win over the creature whom he loves!”  Nemesis, the Goddess of Vengeance answered the request and as Narcissus quenched his thirst at a pool and gazed at the water he grew lovesick towards his own reflection.  The loved became the lover.  As Narcissus realizes he is drowning in love with his own reflection and turns to death stating “death is not so terrible, since it takes my trouble from me; I am sorry only the boy I love must die: we die together.”  Echo, gazing at the scene feels pity for the star-crossed Narcissus and as Narcissus kills himself with Narcissus’ last word “Alas!” Echo replies.  Echo mourned for Narcissus and when venturing to give him a proper burial found instead of a body a daffodil (the flower that was also collected by Persephone before her abduction into the underworld by Pluto and was further named by the botanist Linnaeus).  In the underworld, Narcissus is forever gazing at his reflection in the river Styx.  

            The pity and compassion felt by Echo towards Narcissus, the vain boy that denies her, is the reflection that the egotistical King Charles the Beloved only feels towards his neglected wife Disa in his dreams.  “These heart rendering dreams transformed the drab prose of his feeling for her into strong and strange poetry, subsiding undulation of which would flash and disturbb him throughout the day (209).  The groaning dreamer percieved the disarray of her soul and was aware that an odious undeserved, humiliating disaster had befallen her” (211).  As the brilliant Mary McCarthy states in her review: 

“Love is the burden of Pale Fire, love and loss. Love is felt as a kind of homesickness, that yearning for union described by Plato, the pining for the other half of a once-whole body, the straining of the soul's black horse to unite with the white. The sense of loss in love, of separation” 

            Pale Fire is never ceasing to amaze me.  In Ashley’s last blog, she identified that in reference to “the idea of 'consonne d'appui, "Presumably Shade would like to have ended the whole poem with a consonne d'appui; if the next line after line 999 reads "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain" it will indeed have that consonne d'appui (the "l" of "slain" rhyming with not just the vowel, but also with the preceding consonant, of "slane")"  To expand on this: by considering that to complete this unfinished poem an“echo” of the last line would be stated,  I believe it emphasizes this notion of love and pity.  Ovid realized that Narcissus was in a delusion of love “what you seek is nowhere, and if you turn away, you will take with you the boy you love.  The vision is only shadow, only reflection, lacking any substance” It is as Mary McCarthy puts it the common pattern binding all mortal men. 

“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”