Notes

1] The poem is based on the Greek myth about Tereus, king of Daulis, his wife, Procne, and her sister, Philomela, daughters of Pandion, king of Attica. There are variants of the story (which is told by Ovid, Pausanias, Conon, Achilles Tatius, Apollodorus, and Hyginus) but the one Arnold used tells that, after a few years, Tereus grew enamoured of his wife's sister, and, to be free to marry her, cut out Procne's tongue and hid her away in the countryside, and then let it be known that she was dead. Procne made her plight public by weaving the story into a piece of tapestry. Philomela freed her sister, and together they devised a scheme to avenge her. They killed young Itylus, the son of Procne and Tereus, and served him up to Tereus as a stew during the festival of Bacchus. When Tereus asked for his son, they informed him whom he was eating. With Tereus in pursuit, they fled, and, calling on the gods for aid, they were metamorphosed into birds, Procne into a swallow and her sister into a nightingale. Arnold's version of the myth appears in Gayley's Myths and Murray's Manual of Mythology.

Other poems by Matthew Arnold