ninacarrington

Daphne's Plight

As a child, I was fascinated by the Greek myth of Daphne and Apollo. Eros, the god of love, shoots Apollo with an arrow that makes him desperately in love with ...
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As a child, I was fascinated by the Greek myth of Daphne and Apollo. Eros, the god of love, shoots Apollo with an arrow that makes him desperately in love with Daphne. Eros then shoots Daphne, a river nymph sworn to virginity, with an arrow provoking repulsion for Apollo. Apollo obsessively pursues Daphne and one day determines that he will have her. She flees and, seeing that he will catch her, begs her father, the river god Peneus, to allow the earth to swallow her or change her form rather than allow her to be caught. Her father changes her into a tree.

It’s the moment of transformation that so captured me. The moment when she can see no other way out, when she is so despairing, that she, a river nymph, would sacrifice the constant flow and movement of the water, to be rooted to the still earth where only her branches would sway in the wind.

This is my interpretation of the moment when she is rooted to the ground, her body thrown back by the force of being halted mid-flight.
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