Bucolic Phantasmagoria.

I wonder if there might not be a connection between a passage in Theocritus that's always troubled me, Idylls 1.132-37, and the oddly unsettling final moments of Idyll 7. Daphnis is in his death throes in the Sicilian woods and has just called Pan down from the mountains to receive his pipes; one stanza later he will throw himself into a stream, Hylas-like, and drown.

'νῦν ἴα μὲν φορέοιτε βάτοι, φορέοιτε δ’ ἄκανθαι,
ἁ δὲ καλὰ νάρκισσος ἐπ’ ἀρκεύθοισι κομάσαι,
πάντα δ’ ἄναλλα γένοιτο, καὶ ἁ πίτυς ὄχνας ἐνείκαι,
Δάφνις ἐπεὶ θνάσκει, καὶ τὰς κύνας ὥλαφος ἕλκοι,
κἠξ ὀρέων τοὶ σκῶπες ἀηδόσι γαρύσαιντο.
      λήγετε βουκολικᾶς, Μοῖσαι, ἴτε λήγετ’ ἀοιδᾶς.'
χὢ μὲν τόσσ’ εἰπὼν ἀπεπαύσατο ...

'But now let let the brambles bear violets—let thornbrakes bear them; let the lovely narcissus deck junipers, the pine come to fruit with pears—let everything be changed because Daphnis is dying--let the stag tear hounds apart, from the mountains let owls cry in contest with nightingales. Leave off, ah muses, come leave off the bucolic song.' So much he said, and ended.

We ordinarily take this as a series of ἀδύνατα, impossible disruptions of the natural world unhinged by the death of Daphnis--as though Daphnis thinks of himself and his life as so central to the natural order that his death is just as much an impossibility as fruiting pines or savage stags.

I'm not sure this is the whole story, however. Daphnis doesn't give us any other reason to expect solipsism from him; he doesn't wish for the whole woodland of Sicily to huddle about his agonies with consummate concern, they simply do—it's a function of his beauty and his song. No, if he cries out for the world to burst into alien glory when he breathes his last there must be something else at stake, not narcissism certainly; it's not youthful incredulity in the face of death, either, since this is a voluntary wasting. After all, Priapus can chide him in lines 82-85, saying

                                                  ἁ δέ τυ κώρα
πάσας ἀνὰ κράνας, πάντ’ ἄλσεα ποσσὶ φορεῖται
[...]
ζάτεισ’· ἆ δύσερώς τις ἄγαν καὶ ἀμήχανος ἐσσί.

The girl is roaming on foot among the fountains, through all the groves, in search of you—ah, you are cursed in love, too cursed, and helpless.

This changed world—πάντα ἄναλλα—isn't a world in mourning, either: strange, yes, but indifferent to Daphnis' pain. I do think there's a logic to these ἀδύνατα, though, even if a strange one.