“Since You Cannot Be My Bride, You Must Be My Tree!”—Literary Traditions

Professor Albert Lafarge reports that this digital sketch that Literary Traditions student Sevanna Kilman created depicts how Kilman interprets a moment  in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

“Apollo still lusts after Daphne even after she has turned into a tree, “Sevanna Kilman writes. “He says to the tree he will never forget about her or his love for the woman the tree once was…Beside the laurel tree, he looks outward towards the sunrise as lovers do while the sun rises from the hilltop.”

But Apollo’s emotion isn’t mutual love, Kilman judges. For that reason, the semi-human Daphne so customarily central to representations of this moment has, in Kilman’s digital sketch, already transformed into a tree. It happened as quickly as a sketch, Kilman adds.