The Encounter by Helen Gray Cone
"The Encounter" by Helen Gray Cone is a lyric narrative poem that tells of a brief, enchanting, and ultimately transformative meeting between a young herd-boy and a mysterious woodland maiden. The poem is set in a winding forest path, a green and leafy world carpeted with layers of soft dead leaves, where light filters through the canopy and a single star of open sky appears at the highest point. Into this setting comes a fleet-footed young woman, running lightly through the wood with her long, acorn-coloured hair swaying loose and half-braided. The herd-boy encounters her suddenly and is immediately captivated, calling out to ask where she has come from. She answers only that she has come up from the valley, laughing as she speaks, never slowing her pace. Compelled by something beyond his own reason or will, the boy follows her, even knowing the pursuit might bring him grief. He manages briefly to catch her hand during a moment when she swerves along a side path, and he questions her about the strangeness of her cold, crinkled fingertips. Rather than answering directly and remaining still, she continues to elude him, leaping onto a fallen trunk, swinging on a hanging vine, and darting behind a slender birch tree. From behind its flickering leaves she tells him playfully that her fingers are cold because she spends her time lying along the mossy, stream-side rocks, combing the brook's flowing currents with a strip of bark, listening to the water chide and chatter over stones, and delighting in setting the wavelets into motion. Her laughter mingles with the rippling sounds of the woodland itself until the two become indistinguishable. The herd-boy, drawn beyond restraint, lunges toward the birch where she hides. In that instant something coils around his throat and something strikes his lips, sharp and sudden, leaving him unable to determine whether what touched him was a kiss or a blow. Before he can understand what has happened, she is gone entirely, vanishing without sound or trace. From that day forward the boy never sees her again, neither in the wood nor in the meadow nor among any company of ordinary mortal girls. She does not return to him in any form, and he is left permanently altered. He loses his former ease and cheerfulness, begins to wander apart from others, and grows dreamy and solitary. He feeds on wild berries, mutters words that no one around him can understand, and those words carry within them something of the music of the forest and the stream, as though his brief encounter with the mysterious maiden has awakened in him a sensitivity to the natural world that ordinary life cannot satisfy or contain. The poem belongs broadly to the tradition of fairy or nature-spirit encounter narratives, drawing on the figure of an elemental feminine being intimately associated with water and woodland. Whether the maid is understood as a supernatural creature, a nature spirit, or a symbolic embodiment of poetic inspiration, the effect of meeting her on the boy is the same: he is marked, changed, and set apart from common human experience, gifted or cursed with a longing and an inner music that he cannot share with those around him and that defines the remainder of his imaginative life.
By Helen Gray Cone · First published 1887 · Genre: Narrative Poetry, Romantic Poetry, Ballad