Transcript Daphne and apollo: the laurel tree image

By Becca Zoller
 Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
line 576-748
 Tells the story of
the Greek myth
 Completed in 8
A.D.
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Apollo was an over confident
archer who one day ran into Eros,
an archer and the son of Aphrodite.
Apollo, in boasting of his archery
skills, insults Eros.
Eros has two arrows: one dipped in
gold and another dipped in lead.
He strikes Apollo with the one
dipped in gold and Daphne,
daughter of Peneus the river god,
with the one dipped in lead.
Apollo is cursed, desperate for
Daphne’s love. Daphne runs from
him.
In order to save her, Peneus
transforms Daphne into a laurel
tree.
Apollo adorns himself with some of
the laurel tree leaves and holds in
his heart a special place for the
tree as a symbol of Daphne.
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Canzoniere Part 23 “Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade”
(1327-1368)
Story of Daphne and Apollo
 Also presented in comparison with several other Ovidian myths
in this work
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“A Young Lady Beneath a Laurel Tree”
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Mentions laurel tree in reference with the speakers love for
Laura
“young lady beneath a laurel tree”
“when the green leaves are no more on the laurel”
“I will follow that sweet laurel/through the burning sun or
through the snow”
“Love floods at the foot of the hard laurel”
“my idol sculpted in living laurel”
Speaker compares himself with Apollo which leads Laura to be
unattainable
A more traditional view of the Daphne and Apollo myth, holds
to the Greek tradition
 “The
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Story of Phoebus and Daphne, Applied”
Written in 1645
Carries metaphor as a figure of unattainable love
throughout poem
“Like Phœbus sung the no less amorous boy;/
Like Daphne she, as lovely, and as coy”
Waller’s adaptation of the story of Daphne and
Apollo applied to the courtship of Lady Dorothy
Sidney
 “Endymion”
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Book Four
1818
“Ye shall for ever live and love, for all
Thy tears are flowing.—
By Daphne’s fright, behold Apollo!—”
Tells the story of the Greek myth of Endymion
who loved and pined after the moon goddess,
Selene, named Cynthia in the poem
The comparison to Daphne and Apollo in book
four implies that Cynthia was unattainable for
Endymion, but this metaphor does not hold out
when Cynthia declares that she couldn’t move on
from him.
 “The
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Tree”
1908-1911
“I stood still and was a tree amid the wood,
Knowing the truth of things unseen before;
Of Daphne and the laurel bow
And that god-feasting couple old
that grew elm-oak amid the wold.”
Shows the speaker knew the truth about lovers,
such as Daphne and Apollo, and that they would
never be together
Portrays the idea of love that will never be
reciprocated in a different way, so that it wasn’t
the woman that was unattainable, but the love
itself
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“A Prayer for My Daughter”
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1921
“O may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.”
“How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony's a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.”
The speaker in the first quote wishes for their child to
be as desirable and beautiful as Daphne, represented
by the laurel tree, but wishes her to be as stubborn
and untouchable by lovers as Daphne was when she
was turned into a laurel
The second quote shows the laurel as innocent and
beautiful.
 “Virgin
In A Tree”
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1958
“Ever since that first Daphne
Switched her incomparable back
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For a bay-tree hide, respect's
Twined to her hard limbs like ivy”
The Daphne in Plath’s poem is a symbol of
innocence and beauty as well as a virginal
symbol. Plath compares a woman to a tree to
suggest that women should protect themselves.
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“Where I Live in the
Honorable House of the
Laurel Tree”
 1981
 Compares speaker to
Daphne as being tortured
by Apollo and by being
turned into a tree
 Follows along the line of
Plath’s poem in the way
where Apollo is seen as a
negative figure
 The speaker, as a laurel
tree, suffers.
I live in my wooden legs and O
my green green hands.
Too late
to wish that I had not run from you, Apollo,
blood moves still in my bark bound veins,
I, who ran nymph foot to root in flight,
have only this late desire to arm the
trees I lie within. The measure that I have lost
silks my pulse. Each century, the trickeries
of need pain me everywhere.
Frost taps my skin and I stay glossed
in honor, for you are gone in time. The air
rings for you, for that astonishing rite
of my breathing tent undone with your light.
I only know how this untimely lust has tossed
flesh at the wind forever and moved my fears
toward the intimate Rome of the myth we
crossed.
I am a fist of my unease
as I spill toward the stars in the empty years.
I build the air with the crown of honor; it keys
my out of time and luckless appetite.
You gave me honor too soon, Apollo.
There is no one left who understands
how I wait
here in my wooden legs and O
my green green hands.
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The allusion to the myth of Daphne and Apollo where
Daphne is transformed into a laurel tree changes
through poetic history.
Keats’ poem is where the first shift begins to happen
because the love is achieved in the end. Then, Pound
moves away from the unattainable woman to the
unattainable love.
Yeats writes pushing the speaker’s daughter to be
innocent and beautiful and unattainable like Daphne
is when she is a laurel tree.
Plath continues in the same route as Yeats, inspiring
women to protect themselves as beautiful, innocent,
and virginal like Daphne as a laurel tree.
Sexton applies the myth post-transition by presenting
the speaker as Daphne when she is a laurel tree and
is tortured by nature and Apollo.
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As the myth of Daphne and Apollo shifted in
poetry, it moved away from the idea of a woman
being unattainable to a man who lusted after
her, and into the idea that Daphne, symbolically
represented by the laurel tree, was a beautiful,
innocent, and virginal figure. The speakers of
several poems urge their audience to remain
innocent by being like Daphne and the laurel
tree. However, Sexton’s representation of the
myth, being the most recent, applies both the
original meaning of the myth in an inventive way
by having the speaker of the poem be Daphne as
the laurel tree as well as the more modern,
developed meaning of Daphne as a suffering
character.
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http://www.pantheon.org/articles/d/daphne.html
http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony/Classics/OvidDaphne.htm
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_1/petrarch
.html
http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Italian/PetrarchCanzoniere001-061.htm
https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/html/1807/4350/poem2250.html
http://homepages.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/Yeats.prayer.html
http://www.bartleby.com/126/35.html
http://www.bartleby.com/4/404.html
http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/ezrapound/16185
http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/sylviaplath/1458
http://crab.rutgers.edu/~barbares/Undergrad%20Poetry/Sexton,%20two%20poems.p
df
http://books.google.com/books?id=VP15pB4MwcgC&pg=PA143&lpg=PA143&dq=phoe
bus%20apollo%20daphne%20laurel%20poetry&source=bl&ots=1GhYUBEwKR&sig=kvGG_f_G57_fiZVbgG6RU9V70&hl=en&ei=O6JWSoeaK8Gntgf7nYzJAg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&r
esnum=2
http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=13562060