Bob Scheetz wrote of "eros" and "the secular, carnal, ... human."
However in Daphne and Apollo there is no sexual fulfillment. " I did not
have sex with that woman". and in the case of Baucis and Philemon they are
well past their erotic prime. That leaves Pound standing alone mateless as a
tree, but really, as we all know, a poet thinking he's a tree. I hope we are
not going Freudian at this point,  not when we are finally enjoying such
rarefied metaphysical aether just having crawled out of the swampy Urschleim
of insidious politics and economics.
    But ladies and gentlemen, do you see the relationship of the tree and
light to sub rosa alchemy? "Aurum nostrum non est aurum vulgi." And the
Indo-European proclivity to tree worship? a durable fantasy vide Druids,
etc.
    e.g. beth (Gaelic) means both "birch" and stands for the letter "B"
(Hebrew "B" is also beth= "house" only in as much as the womb from which the
divine child is born at winter solstice, hieroglyphically represented by
Horus [the elder] pictured as a hawk within a square (house) all of which is
the glyph for Hathor, the mother goddess, hence the confusion)
    The Greek version is Dionysus dendrites (born of the tree) another
durable fantasy esp. when carved in Ogham-Runic letters (trees) on his
thyrsus to make the primstaff (O.E.D. p.1369).
    Likewise Odin (Mercury) with his runicstaff carries the contract on that
staff made with Erde (earth) and the three weird sisters, the Norns,
Germanic version of the Greek fates, Vedic maruts.
    You may call this rank folly, but imagine all of this coming to one
intuitively who has nothing to do but stand around pretending that he is a
tree. Did he do this later in life at St. Elizabeth's? Could he have been
suffering from repressed erotic dendropsychosis?

Charles Moyer