I really really love Oenone's lament for her trees in Tennyson's poem. Like, we have heard her mourning, we have seen her fear at the result of Paris handing the apple to Aphrodite, we have even had a short rant (angry and desperate and bargaining) about her beauty not being good enough for Paris.
But Oenone is also an Oread. Being abandoned by your only love is one thing, but to even have his actions result in her *trees*, her *forest* being cut down, has to have cut into her very being.
- Εnone, Alfred Tennyson (1842):
"O mother, hear me yet before I die.
They came, they cut away my tallest pines,
my dark tall pines, that plumed the craggy ledge
high over the blue gorge, and all between
the snowy peak and snow-white cataract
foster'd the callow eaglet β from beneath
whose thick mysterious boughs in the dark morn
the panther's roar came muffled, while I sat
low down in the valley. Never, never more
shall lone Εnone see the morning mist
sweep thro' them, never see them overlaid
with narrow moon-lit strips of silver cloud,
between the loud stream and the trembling stars."
ALSO i used to read the poem as taking place while the Trojan War was already in full swing, meaning that the trees being cut down must have been for palisades and war machines and such. But reading one article ("Tennyson and the Voices of Ovid's Heroines" by A. A. Markley) made me realize that PARIS HIMSELF cut down her trees just to build the ship with which he could sail toward Helen. Bury Paris alive istg π
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