Narcissus
A youth who fell in love with his own image reflected in a pool, and who wasted away from unsatisfied desire, whereupon he was transformed by Diana (God of the hunt) into the flower, Narcissus; any bulbous plant belonging to the genus Narcissus of the amaryllis family has showy yellow or white flowers, with a cup-shaped corona.
Look closely: a coy surfaces beneath the water in fascination, as a frog sits perched on a lily pad about to be splashed. Narcissus is represented here as a North African nomad caught in the process of transforming from a man to a woman and then petrified into a stone fountain. Adorned with trinkets, including a medallion of Diana protecting a cherub from a lion. She/he personifies the preoccupation of most cultures in defining, harnessing and controlling sexuality and fixing time as beauty—something arguably indefinable—and, by any description, existing with the brevity of a flower.
Narcissus survived the translation of the Greeks by the Romans, and Ovid wrote about the myth in Metamorphoses. Keats and Alfred Edward Housman wrote of him, and painters Caravaggio, Poussin, Turner, and Dali all rendered his image. Russian author Dostoevsky resurrected the lonely Narcissus-type character in his poems and novels.
Early Spring / early evening
A youth who fell in love with his own image reflected in a pool, and who wasted away from unsatisfied desire, whereupon he was transformed by Diana (God of the hunt) into the flower, Narcissus; any bulbous plant belonging to the genus Narcissus of the amaryllis family has showy yellow or white flowers, with a cup-shaped corona.
Look closely: a coy surfaces beneath the water in fascination, as a frog sits perched on a lily pad about to be splashed. Narcissus is represented here as a North African nomad caught in the process of transforming from a man to a woman and then petrified into a stone fountain. Adorned with trinkets, including a medallion of Diana protecting a cherub from a lion. She/he personifies the preoccupation of most cultures in defining, harnessing and controlling sexuality and fixing time as beauty—something arguably indefinable—and, by any description, existing with the brevity of a flower.
Narcissus survived the translation of the Greeks by the Romans, and Ovid wrote about the myth in Metamorphoses. Keats and Alfred Edward Housman wrote of him, and painters Caravaggio, Poussin, Turner, and Dali all rendered his image. Russian author Dostoevsky resurrected the lonely Narcissus-type character in his poems and novels.
Early Spring / early evening
© Copyright 2016 Jeffrey A’Hearn
