Eros and Psyche: Some Versions of Romantic Love and Delicacy

In 1820 Keats wrote his "Ode to Psyche" and hailed the immortalized maiden as the "brightest" and the "loveliest vision far / Of all Olympus' faded hierarchy"-superlatives fully appropriate to his own conceptions and to one interpretative tradition (the erotic) which he and his age inherited. But when the poet also saluted her as the "latest born," we must, for the sake of proper perspective, qualify his utterance. Psyche may indeed have come too late for the most ancient of vows and "too, too late" for the most naive and simple of "fond believing" lyres; but her story has in fact been in Western consciousness from at least the fourth century B.C. right up to the present time, when C. S. Lewis adapted the legend in his parable, Till We Have Faces, and when Joyce Carol Oates gave the title of "Cupid and Psyche" to a story about a love and passion that moves from a vague longing and dread through fulfillment and almost simultaneous disgust to the warmth and safety of a marriage that is loveless but yet impregnable. The millennial interest in the fable told by Apuleius in The Golden Ass has produced periods of intense preoccupation. Of these uses of the legend none is more interesting, varied, and profound-none possesses greater implications for contemporary life and manners-than the obsessive concern of pre-Romantic and Romantic writers and artists. Hellenistic, Roman, and early Christian culture had produced at least twenty surviving statues of Psyche alone, some seven Christian sarcophagi that used the legend, and a set of mosaics on a Christian ceiling