ABSTRACT
The English epyllion is a narrative poem based on Ovidian mythological narratives. In the English epyllion, Eros and music are always part of the highly rhetorical frame of the mythological subject at hand. The English epyllion is a depository of conventional musical imagery such as found elsewhere in Early Modern poetry, especially in pastoral poetry. The epyllion is a musicalized universe, because of references to rustic music-making but mainly because of the natural music which pervades every nook and cranny of the pastoral setting. The nightingale also illustrates the awakening of the potential for music of natural objects, an amplification of their natural capacities granting almost Orphic power to the bird. Echo is an example of the relationship between music, rhetoric and erotic frustration, twisting the philosophical associations of the myth. The multifaceted mythological figure particularly illustrates the link between the rhetoricization of love and the perversion of the philosophical ideal of Eros.
