A Slow Dance with Heartbreak
Her sirens song makes me sail into the rocks.
She’s a ghost now and a sweet yet distant nightmare.
Our love died a little more every single day.
For two and a half years she made me happy in hell,
and for eight months she’s been killing me.
That face is burned into my eyes and I see it everywhere.
Her sirens song makes me sail into the rocks.
She’s a ghost now and a sweet yet distant nightmare.
Our love died a little more every single day.
For two and a half years she made me happy in hell,
and for eight months she’s been killing me.
That face is burned into my eyes and I see it everywhere.
Odysseus and Sirens -- Bildo Fabriko
The Seirenes (Sirens) used their music and singing to lure sailors to wreck their ships on the Sirenum scopuli (3 rocky islands mentioned by Publius Vergilius Maro and Publius Ovidius Naso), which many sources located near Capri. They were originally portrayed as being of either sex, but male Sirens disappeared from artistic portrayals by the 5th century BCE, and eventually their apian characteristics gave way to those of beautiful women, indicating that not only their voices but also their bodies were seductive. Homeros provided one of the most famous accounts in the “Odyssey” – Odysseus had his men plug their ears with beeswax so they could not hear them but ordered them to tie him to the mast so he could hear them unharmed. According to Gaius Iulius Hyginus in the 1st century, sirens were fated to live only until the mortals who heard their songs were able to pass by them, so after Odysseus was safe they flung themselves into the water and perished. However, for Christian writers they came to embody female temptation – describing women, the 17th-century Jesuit theologian Cornelius Cornelii a Lapide said, "her glance is that of the fabled basilisk, her voice a siren's voice -- with her voice she enchants, with her beauty she deprives of reason -- voice and sight alike deal destruction and death.” In "Das Schweigen der Sirenen," Franz Kafka claimed that “the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence. And though admittedly such a thing never happened, it is still conceivable that someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence certainly never."
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