Hero and Leander (poem)

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Hero and Leander is a mythological poem by Christopher Marlowe. After Marlowe's death it was completed by George Chapman.

[edit] Story

Marlowe's poem treats the Greek legend of Hero and Leander, youths living in cities on opposite sides of the Hellespont, a narrow body of water in northwestern Turkey. Hero is a priestess or devotee of Aphrodite in Sestos, who lives in chastity despite being devoted to the goddess of love. At a festival in honor of her deity and Adonis, she is espied by Leander, a youth from Abydos on the opposite side of the Hellespont. Leander falls in love with her, and she reciprocates, although cautiously, as her parents will not allow her to marry a foreigner.

Leander convinces her to abandon her fears. Hero lives in a high tower overlooking the water; he asks her to light a lamp in her window, and he promises to swim the Hellespont each night to be with her. She complies. On his first night's swim, Leander is spotted by Poseidon, who confuses him with Ganymede and carries him to the bottom of the ocean. Discovering his mistake, the god returns him to shore with a bracelet supposed to keep him safe from drowning. Leander finds Hero; he attempts to make love to her, but she alternates between resistance and acquiescence. The poem breaks off as dawn is about to break.

Had Marlowe continued the poem, it is likely that he would have ended the poem as the classical authors do, with Leander's death by drowning; however, in view of Marlowe's generally free way with his sources and the detail of the bracelet, it seems possible that he might have changed the ending.

[edit] Genre, source, and style

The poem is most properly called an epyllion, that is, a "little epic": it is longer than a lyric or elegy, but concerned with love rather than with traditional epic subjects, and it has a lengthy digression--in this case, Marlowe's invented story of how scholars became poor. Marlowe certainly knew the story as told by both Ovid and perhaps as told by the Byzantine poet Musæus Grammaticus; in view of the debt he owes to Ovid throughout his career, Ovid may safely be called the principal influence on the poem.

Yet if Ovid gave it form and subject, the poem is marked by Marlowe's unique style of extravagant fancy and violent emotion. Perhaps the most famous instance of these qualities in the poem is the opening description of Hero's costume, which includes a blue skirt stained with the blood of "wretched lovers slain" and a veil woven with flowers so realistic that she is continually forced to swat away bees. The final encounter of the two lovers is even more frenzied, with the two at times appearing closer to blows than to embraces.