If art is the eloquence left Philomela, what answer does it inspire? Pain speaks to pain. “Why should one make pretty speeches and the other be dumb?” Procne wonders, looking back and forth between Philomela’s tapestry and her son. Itys’s ability to speak throws Philomela’s silence into loud relief, and though he says nothing in the myth, his flesh “keep[s] something of the spirit” alive. When Procne dismembers him, he “leap[s] in the boiling kettles… hisse[s] on the turning skewers.” Pain, too, is a language. It raves in me with a diabolic tongue.

The Metamorphoses, 6.647–649

Czeslaw Milosz, “Language”

*

Rape is the dark seam of The Metamorphoses. To Ovid, a poet, perhaps the ultimate dehumanizing act would bring the body to a place beyond language. People in his versions of the myths often become animals, men and women “more cut off from words than a seal,” as Robert Lowell wrote of one manic stint spent in McLean. To live cut off from words is to descend into the bodily, the irrational. It is, if words make law and government, to be outside political power. To make his (literate, male) audience understand such powerlessness, Ovid frames the rape from Philomela’s point of view. He centers male agency within a silent female consciousness.

Lowell, “Waking in the Blue,” 24

*

But if you stubbornly keep lying down in bed, dressed,

You’ll feel my hands by way of your torn dress:

In fact, if my anger should carry me further,

You’ll show wounded arms to your mother.

Propertius 2.15.17–20

Or Ovid features rape because it is a trope of Roman elegiac discourse. Arma, amor, ira. Either way, desire is scripted by violence.

*

Madness to insist upon narrative cohesion when the story is one of fragmentation, chaos. The story is one of raving. Philomela’s descent is an unveiling of the animal heart at the world’s center. The girl, running as if flying into the woods. The girl flying. Tereus crystallized in the body of a spike-crowned predator. If we become the thing that symbolizes us, it is not change then, but revelation.

*

[Tereus] was a passionate man, and all the Thracians

are quick at loving; a double fire

all too burned in him: his own passion and his nation’s.