Echo
There's a rule of echoes,
Bouncing off reflective surfaces
Like a nymph in the woods,
Crying, crying, crying.
Voiceless sounds rebounding through the trees
For the want of her love: Echo.
Music and Voices: Malcolm Bothwell
Words: Paul Williamson
© 2011
Detail from John William Waterhouse, Echo and Narcissus, 1903. Oil on canvas, 109.2 x 189.2 cm. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.
NOW WHEN SHE SAW NARCISSUS wandering through the fields, she was inflamed with love and followed him by stealth; and the more she followed, the more she burned by a nearer flame; as when quick-burning sulphur, smeared round the tops of torches, catches fire from another fire brought near. Oh, how often does she long to approach him with alluring words and make soft prayers to him! But her nature forbids this, nor does it permit her to begin; but as it allows, she is ready to await the sounds to which she may give back her own words. By chance the boy, separated from his faithful companions, had cried: ‘Is anyone here?’ and ‘Here!’ cried Echo back. Amazed, he looks around in all directions and with loud voice cries ‘Come!’; and ‘Come!’ she calls him calling. He looks behind him and, seeing no one coming, calls again: ‘Why do you run from me?’ and hears in answer his own words again. He stands still, deceived by the answering voice, and ‘Here let us meet,’ he cries. Echo, never to answer other sound more gladly, cries: ‘Let us meet’; and to help her own words she comes forth from the woods that she may throw her arms around the neck she longs to clasp. But he flees at her approach and, fleeing, says: ‘Hands off! embrace me not ! May I die before I give you power o'er me!’ ‘I give you power o’er me!’ she says, and nothing more. Thus spurned, she lurks in the woods, hides her shamed face among the foliage, and lives from that time on in lonely caves. But still, though spurned, her love remains and grows on grief; her sleepless cares waste away her wretched form; she becomes gaunt and wrinkled and all moisture fades from her body into the air. Only her voice and her bones remain: then, only voice; for they say that her bones were turned to stone. She hides in woods and is seen no more upon the mountain-sides; but all may hear her, for voice, and voice alone, still lives in her.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book III, ll.370–401, trans. Frank Justus Miller, 3rd edn, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1977).