Love, unruliest hope, when fierce Diana went wild
With savage discourse, the arrow-stroke of her tongue—
While rage-hounds bay in wooded Gargaphie—aimed at Actaeon.
Or old Baucis her god-giving bone fat of mind,
Stewed the broth of covenant for Zeus to repay in kind.
Then Parthenope, siren-stung in her whirlpool of sea vines,
Her maiden-voice is a breath of sand for Naples to muse upon.
The body of Helen still lies in ages-old smoke over our cities,
We live in the timberframe of her bones of burned ships.
Why can’t her death be an end to all skies?
All these myths have some form of love, whether unrequited, holy, self-sustaining, or ruinous.
Diana, goddess of the hunt, turned Actaeon into a stag who was then chased and killed by his own hounds; he had gazed on her bathing.
Baucis and Philemon, an old couple, provided food and shelter to two wandering peasants, the gods Zeus and Hermes in disguise. The town had shunned the two, and Zeus urged the old couple to safety while he destroyed the town. Their home then became a temple.
Parthenope, a siren whose name means maiden-voice, drowned herself when she failed to lure Odysseus; her body washed up on the shore of what became Naples.
The well-known myth of Helen, whether seduced or abducted by Paris, launched the Trojan War and as Marlowe famously wrote, “Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships, / And burnt the ******* towers of Ilium.”
