First Kiss
The youth, inexperience and innocence of this teenage love affair is manifest through the somewhat confused, fractured and uncertain response by Daphnis to his first real kiss from Chloe. In a very short period, his emotional reaction runs quite the gamut, taking him from images of sweetness to pain to death to wildly paranoid speculation:
“What a change has Chloe's kiss wrought in me! Her lips are softer than rosebuds, her mouth is sweeter than the honeycomb, but her kiss burns more fiercely than a bee-sting…I pant, I tremble, I languish…Oh fatal victory, fraught with strange pangs : the very name of it is unknown to me. Did Chloe taste some poison spell ere she kissed me?
First Look
Equally brimming with a multitude of emotional reactions is the description of Daphnis following the first time he sees her naked body:
“Yet Daphnis' heart was not at peace since he had seen the fair, unveiled graces of his love, and his heart was stricken with pain as if wasting away by poisonous drugs and like some victim in the chase his breath came thick and fast and anon his limbs failed under him as though his strength was spent in the perils already undergone.”
Winter is Here
Book III opens with a description of winter’s arrival and all it entails upon the residents of the village. Rather than merely asserting that the coming of the cold places a hardship upon them, the author brings that hardship to tangible life through the use of images showing this hardship:
“The snow fell thick and fast and blocked the roads and locked the peasants in their cottages. The torrents roared down the ravines, the ice froze firm and thick : the trees looked gaunt, the branches ready to snap, all the ground was hid, save where the springs and streams broke forth. None led his flock to pasture, none ventured out of doors, but huge fires were kindled on the hearth at cockcrow”
The Birds and the Bees
For those who have always wondered what’s the deal with the birds and the bees being star players in the drama of learning the facts of life, suffice to say that unlike the escape from the cold of winter by staying indoors, spring brings forth the desire to run free and wild like certain creatures that reappear with the arrival of warm weather:
“spring was now coming on and flowers were in bloom throughout the woods, in the meadows and on the hillsides. The bees were humming and the birds sweetly singing…lambs frisked on the hill slopes to the humming of the bees in the meadows and the singing of the birds in the thickets…now that all around was bright and gay, they in the lightness of their hearts would mimic now the sweet sounds and anon the sweet sights…when they heard the birds singing, they would sing…and from the bees they learned to pick the choicest blooms, and with some they would deck their breasts”
