Theocritus A Villanelle - Analysis

An invocation that asks for a lost world to answer back

Wilde’s central move is simple and haunting: he calls to an ancient pastoral voice and asks whether it can still remember Sicily. The poem reads like a prayer addressed to Theocritus (the great Sicilian pastoral poet), but it’s also a test of poetry itself: can song keep a place alive, or does it only make absence sharper? The repeated cry O Singer of Persephone! casts the addressee as someone who sings in the shadow of loss—Persephone being the goddess whose very story turns on disappearance and return. From the start, Sicily is not just geography; it’s a remembered paradise being summoned out of a kind of underworld.

Persephone’s dim meadows versus Sicily’s bright pasture

The poem’s emotional voltage comes from its opening contradiction: the singer is imagined in dim meadows desolate, yet he is asked to recall a landscape of bees, ivy, shepherds, and sea. Persephone’s realm suggests distance, seasonal severance, and the cold hush after life has been taken away. Against that, Sicily arrives as a place of sensuous persistence: Still through the ivy flits the bee. The tension is that the poem insists on stillness in two meanings at once—Sicily still exists in the mind and in art, yet it may also be still in the sense of frozen, unreachable, like a scene preserved behind glass.

Amaryllis: the pastoral as beautiful and embalmed

Wilde’s Sicily is built from specific pastoral figures, and the details matter. Amaryllis lies in state is a startling phrase for a supposedly carefree genre: it borrows the language of royal display and even of death. Pastoral beauty here is not merely blooming; it is arranged, formal, and faintly funereal—already a memory being curated. The bee flitting through ivy suggests ongoing life, but Amaryllis’s pose suggests a world turned into an exhibit. Wilde seems to admire the classical idyll while admitting it has become an artifact, something we can only “visit” through art.

Simaetha and Hecate: the pastoral darkens at the gate

The poem keeps puncturing its own sunlight. Simaetha’s scene—she calls on Hecate and hears wild dogs at the gate—introduces witchcraft, fear, and threshold imagery. A gate is a boundary, and the dogs make it feel guarded: not everything in Sicily is open meadow. This is where the Persephone address feels most precise. The singer Wilde invokes is not a naïve shepherd’s piper; he is someone whose song knows the nearby presence of the underworld, the way love and desire can tip into dread. Sicily, in this poem, is a place where charm and menace share the same air.

Polypheme, Daphnis, Lacon: a chorus of longing that won’t end

Even the poem’s brighter scenes carry ache. By the light and laughing sea Polypheme—usually a figure of monstrous force—is reduced to someone who bemoans his fate. Then the poem pivots to youth: boyish rivalry, Daphnis challenging his mate, and Slim Lacon keeping a goat for thee while jocund shepherds wait. These are invitations, but they’re also reminders that the invited one is absent. The repeated word Still becomes a kind of spell: Wilde keeps reasserting that these figures persist, yet each reassertion sounds more like self-persuasion. The refrain’s insistence—Dost thou remember Sicily?—suggests fear that the answer is no, or that memory itself belongs to the dead.

The refrain as a plea: if the singer forgets, the world vanishes

The poem’s returning lines act like a tightening circle, not merely a decorative pattern. Each time Wilde repeats O Singer of Persephone!, the address becomes more urgent, as though the speaker is trying to pull the singer back across a boundary. And each time he asks Dost thou remember Sicily?, it feels less like casual nostalgia and more like a metaphysical wager: if the singer forgets, the pastoral world collapses into the dim meadows with him. The poem finally leaves us suspended between two kinds of permanence—Sicily as eternally present in song, and Sicily as eternally lost except as song.

What if the poem’s sweetest claim is also its cruelest? Wilde says Still again and again, but the very need to say it hints that the living world cannot actually hold still. The shepherds wait, the goat is kept for thee, and yet the addressee remains a Singer of Persephone: a voice tethered to disappearance. The poem’s beauty lies in that unresolved pressure—between the desire to return and the knowledge that return may only happen as repetition.