4 - Philomela and the Dread of Dawn

Summary

Roughly halfway through Lucrece, Shakespeare's sophomore epyllion of 1594 and one of the few narrative poems he would ever compose, the narrator provides what Jonathan Bate has called ‘temporal punctuation’ for the titular heroine's complaint: he does so with an allusion to the womancum- nightingale Philomela, whose violent tragedy of kidnapping, sexual assault, and mutilation is relayed in Book 6 of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Noting the approach of ‘blushing morrow’ as ‘solemn night … descend[s] / To ugly hell’, Shakespeare's narrator declares Lucrece a ‘lamenting Philomel’ in a reference that, it has been observed, ‘seems designed to create syntactical parallels between the two violated women’. A mere seven stanzas later, the Shakespearean heroine reaffirms this affinity, for she proceeds to address Philomela directly:

‘Come, Philomel, that sing'st of ravishment,

Make thy sad grove in my dishevelled hair.

As the dank earth weeps at thy languishment,

So I at each sad strain will strain a tear.

And with deep groans the diapason bear;

For burden-wise I'll hum on Tarquin still,

While thou on Tereus descants better skill.

‘And whiles against a thorn thou bear'st thy part

To keep thy sharp woes waking, wretched I,

To imitate thee well, against my heart

Will fix a sharp knife to affright mine eye,

Who if it wink shall thereon fall and die.

These means, as frets upon an instrument,

Shall tune our heart-strings to true languishment.

‘And for, poor bird, thou sing'st not in the day,

As shaming any eye should thee behold,

Some dark deep desert seated from the way,

That knows not parching heat nor freezing cold,

Will we find out; and there we will unfold

To creatures stern sad tunes to change their kinds.

Since men prove beasts, let beasts bear gentle minds’

In these lines, Shakespeare's ‘cloudy Lucrece’ not only aligns her own rape with that of this legendary victim, but she also attributes the nightingale's characteristic aversion to the dawn – like her own antipathy towards ‘Revealing day’ – to the bird's parallel desire to avoid the shame of diurnal Visibility.