To Her You Were Like a Visible Close Reading

The poem begins in the past tense with “to here you were a visible goddess”. The reader assumes that there has been a shift of circumstances when on the next stanza it begins with “now she is”. The middle stanzas describe a beautiful environment and are rich with visual imagery of flowers and twilight. Overall, this poem has a melancholy feel. Halfway through the poem, the sun has set, which might represent the goddess that was once visible, but now sinks behind sea. There is a visual theme of night. The subject stands out like the “rose-tipped moon”. Maybe she is blushing, because that’s always embarrassing. The last stanza finally makes it clear to the reader what has happened. This subject of the poem is heartbroken. Her spirit is “wasted with yearning” and her “heart consumed with pain". She mentions Atthis, who is the source of this pain.

This poem’s structure was interesting because it only made sense to me after the last stanza. I then had to work backwards back through the poem to fully understand the metaphors in the middle stanzas. The beginning stanza mentions, “your singing her greatest delight”. I think the “your” refers to Atthis. I get the sense that the beautiful “flowering fields” represent a real location, that the subject of the poem is listening to Atthis sing. I imagine that the “light that spreads equally” and the “bountiful dew” that “pours down” is Atthis singing to an audience of Lydian women who “bloom” at the beautiful singing, but “she” cannot enjoy this landscape any longer. What once was her greatest delight is now a painful experience.