Echo

• Echo (Greek mythology)


  Told in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Echo was a mountain nymph who had offended the Goddess Hera by not allowing her to spy on her husband. Echo was cursed by Hera to only repeat the last words spoken, unable to communicate her love to Narcissus.
• Come to me in the silence of the night;:

  • 'Anaphora, imperative - need and desperation, suppressed passion
  • ''night' - Connotations of sin and sexual desire (John 12 'Whoever walks in the dark does not know where they are going')
• Come in the speaking silence of a dream;:

  • 'Sibilance - intimate quality, serpent - original sin, juxtaposition, oxymoron - extent of emotion, inner conflict, apostrophe - private addressal, voyeuristic, inability to communicate linking back to the myth of Echo, muted consonance - contributed to hushed tones'
• Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright:

  • 'Conflict with desire and faith, purity of love, infantilised (Matthew 19 'Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these'), parallelism'
• As sunlight on a stream;: '

  • John 8 - 'I am the light of the world', sibilance - Love and nature, the beauty of the mortal realm'
• Come back in tears,:

  • 'Repetitive motif of water - baptism, Mark 16 Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, link to the death of Narcissus, destructive desire + consequences of love'
• O memory, hope, love of finished years.:

  • 'Anaphora - distress, archaism - biblical allusion, faith in love + internal conflict between love and faith, caesura - emotive qualities, endstop - the definite nature of both time and death, juxtaposition - desire for a dreamlike state'
• Oh dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,:

  • 'Lexical field of ethereal things, repetition - reflective of the steps in earthly love, juxtaposition - ephemeral nature of life's joys, diacope - stinging nature of grief - gradual awakening, internal echo - gradual distance from lover, 'o' - sigh of passion + pain, ignorance of reality, repetition - identifies sweetness - foreign entity, dream = tangible object'
• Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,:

  • 'Alliteration, 'should' - human morality overriding that of God, sin - fall of Lucifer, human desire, paradise - earthy vs heavily desire'
• Where souls brimfull of love abide and meet;: '

  • 'we who are still alive will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the lord in the air', desire to abandon mortal form, anaphora - longing for lover - religious interrelation 'do not take to lord's name in vain', 'abide' biblical emphasis, 'when people rise from death ,there will be no marriage. People will not be married to each other .they will be like angels in heaven' - Matthew 22:30'
• Where thirsting longing eyes:

  • ''blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted', lust & desire - conflict between earthly and heavenly loyalties, 'window to the soul', connections to fight and reality - choice to be blind - innate human desire'
• Watch the slow door: '

  • 'Jesus Christ said "i am the door; whoever enters through me shall be saved' John 10, imperative - strength of desire, speaking in heaven - painful wait for lover, like an echo - unable to realise'
• That opening, letting in, lets out no more.:

  • 'Revelations 21 ; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, death as the final destination - irreversible quality, alliteration + juxtaposition - the slim line between life and death'
• Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live:

  • 'Rejection of reality, repetition of poems core ideals, polyptoton + juxtaposition of tense - jump back to reality'
• My very life again tho' cold in death::

  • 'Loss of love materialising into physical sensations - extreme nature of love, juxtaposition between life and death - the complementary nature of the two'
• Come back to me in dreams, that I may give:

  • 'Imperative - rejection of God, personal pronouns - abandonment of lover'
• Pulse for pulse, breath for breath::

  • 'Finished vitality - an echo of time - the myth of Echo and how she continuously fails to calls for her lover - longing + the cyclical nature of life and suffering, synecdoche - desire to donate full self - Genesis 2, physically out of breathe - anticipation - rhythmical connotation'
• Speak low, lean low,:

  • Greek myth: Narcissus gazed + fell in love with his reflection in the water. Motif of water. drowned while looking at his own reflection. Reflects what love can take away from us. Urging him to lean lower and drown so that she is reunited with him. - desire for death
  • ‘Speak low’ - hides desperation because she is aware of the controversy behind this statement.
• As long ago, my love, how long ago.:

  • 'Questions + repetition - loss of identity = soul sleep, lives on through the foggy and perverse recollection of memories, rhetorical question - the lingering nature of memories'