Echo

“Come to me in the silence of the night;
Come to me in the speaking silence of a dream;
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
As sunlight on a stream;
Come back in tears,
O memory, hope, love of finished years.”

Christina Rossetti “Echo”

When our voice returns to us, disembodied, out of the depths of some rocky cove, we may be reminded of the ill fated wood nymph of Greek myth from whose name, Echo, our word for this phenomenon derives.

Echo, a lovely young woodland maiden, was blessed with an extremely charming voice. She has the bad fortune, however, to distract the jealous goddess, Hera, who is trying to catch her wayward husband at one of his infidelities. Hera, in frustrated rage, turns on the innocent girl and levels a curse: “You, who love to talk so much, may hereafter have always the last word-- and only the last!” From this moment on she can only repeat the final utterance of whoever happens to be near her.

The unlucky girl then falls in love with the self-absorbed Narcissus who rejects the strange half-mute with her fragmented speech. She wastes away in helpless sorrow until only her lovely voice remains to haunt the wild places where she is still heard to this day.

This painting was inspired in part by Edvard Munch’s “The Voice,” in which a young woman in white stands between pine trees in a nordic twilight. It was also suggested by frequent walks in a nearby park where beech trees are marked with the carved names of individuals and of couples, the silent ‘echo’ of an unknown history.