The Wood Nymph
The wood nymph shivered
Cold, cold wind blew through her garments
It felt like icicle daggers piercing her heart
Ages uncounted she had stood on this hill
Guarding the great oak
Being the great oak
And all the great oak’s brood.
The recollection calmed her
Warmed her inside
But only for a while
Her children were safe, strong, growing
But she was not
It was time to say goodbye
To her saplings
To the world
To life
She cried one tear
And an acorn dropped
Wood Nymph [body painting] -- Vincent Abbey
The wood nymph shivered
Cold, cold wind blew through her garments
It felt like icicle daggers piercing her heart
Ages uncounted she had stood on this hill
Guarding the great oak
Being the great oak
And all the great oak’s brood.
The recollection calmed her
Warmed her inside
But only for a while
Her children were safe, strong, growing
But she was not
It was time to say goodbye
To her saplings
To the world
To life
She cried one tear
And an acorn dropped
Wood Nymph [body painting] -- Vincent Abbey
Wood nymphs were called dryads by the Greeks; “Drys” meant “oak,” so dryads were specifically spirits of oak trees and could shapeshift from trees to humanlike. (The ones associated with ash trees were called the meliai, whose mother was Gaea [the earth] after she was made fertile by the blood of the castrated titan, the sky god Uranus -- the meliai later tended the infant Zeus in the cave where Gaia’s daughter Rhea bore and hid Zeus to save him from his father Kronos [time]; the apple tree nymphs were the epimelides, who guarded the tree that held the golden fleece; the karyatides were associated with walnut trees.) Like all nymphs, the dryads were supernaturally long-lived and tied to their arboreal homes, but those known as hamadryads were an integral part of their trees, so if the tree died so did its hamadryad; humans who harmed trees without first propitiating the tree nymphs were punished by the gods. Sylvia Plath wrote two dryad poems:
ReplyDelete1)On the Plethora of Dryads
Hearing a white saint rave
About a quintessential beauty
Visible only to the paragon heart,
I tried my sight on an apple-tree
That for eccentric knob and wart
Had all my love.
Without meat or drink I sat
Starving my fantasy down
To discover that metaphysical Tree which hid
From my worldling look its brilliant vein
Far deeper in gross wood
Than axe could cut.
But before I might blind sense
To see with the spotless soul,
Each particular quirk so ravished me
Every pock and stain bulked more beautiful
Than flesh of any body
Flawed by love's prints.
Battle however I would
To break through that patchwork
Of leaves' bicker and whisk in babel tongues,
Streak and mottle of tawn bark,
No visionary lightnings
Pierced my dense lid.
Instead, a wanton fit
Dragged each dazzled sense apart
Surfeiting eye, ear, taste, touch, smell;
Now, snared by this miraculous art,
I ride earth's burning carrousel
Day in, day out,
And such grit corrupts my eyes
I must watch sluttish dryads twitch
Their multifarious silks in the holy grove
Until no chaste tree but suffers blotch
Under flux of those seductive
Reds, greens, blues.
2)On the Difficulty of Conjuring up a Dryad
Ravening through the persistent bric-à-brac
Of blunt pencils, rose-sprigged coffee cup,
Postage stamps, stacked books' clamor and yawp,
Neighborhood cockcrow—all nature's prodigal backtalk,
The vaunting mind
Snubs impromptu spiels of wind
And wrestles to impose
Its own order on what is.
‘With my fantasy alone,’ brags the importunate head,
Arrogant among rook-tongued spaces,
Sheep greens, finned falls, ‘I shall compose a crisis
To stun sky black out, drive gibbering mad
Trout, cock, ram,
That bulk so calm
On my jealous stare,
Self-sufficient as they are.’
But no hocus-pocus of green angels
Damasks with dazzle the threadbare eye;
‘My trouble, doctor, is: I see a tree,
And that damn scrupulous tree won't practice wiles
To beguile sight:
E.g., by cant of light
Concoct a Daphne;
My tree stays tree.
‘However I wrench obstinate bark and trunk
To my sweet will, no luminous shape
Steps out radiant in limb, eye, lip,
To hoodwink the honest earth which pointblank
Spurns such fiction
As nymphs; cold vision
Will have no counterfeit
Palmed off on it.
‘No doubt now in dream-propertied fall some moon-eyed,
Star-lucky sleight-of-hand man watches
My jilting lady squander coin, gold leaf stock ditches,
And the opulent air go studded with seed,
While this beggared brain
Hatches no fortune,
But from leaf, from grass,
Thieves what it has.’