Winifred Welles’s sonnet «To Narcissus» gives the mirror of the myth a voice, and that voice begins by emptying itself out. The speaker announces that she has no beauty all her own, no special loveliness carved out of her, no glowing images wrought perfectly. Everything she might have been as a finished, beautiful object is refused in the octave. Instead, she defines herself as pure relation: a pool, a mirror, a surface whose whole purpose is to return the beloved’s image. That is the poem’s central drama — a self that seems to consist entirely of enabling somebody else’s self-regard. Yet the poem is not simply about self-sacrifice; by speaking, the mirror claims a strange kind of power, because without her there would be no reflection, no “I am” for Narcissus to admire.
The fourteen lines fall into a Petrarchan shape. The octave’s envelope rhymes keep circling back: “own” returns as “bone,” “shown” and “alone,” while the shorter sounds of “me,” “be” and “see” create a polished, almost spell-like surface. This enclosure imitates the very act of reflection: the sound of “own” reappears in “shown” and “alone,” just as Narcissus’s face reappears in the water. The meter is mostly iambic pentameter, though the negative catalogue in the first four lines is slowed by heavier words such as “loveliness,” “perfectly” and “delicacy.” With the ninth line the poem turns from definition to event: “When you lean to me.” The grammar shifts into the present tense, becomes more urgent, and the sestet’s rhymes pair “grace” with “face,” “eyes” with “wise.” That pairing of a body’s beauty with understanding is exactly what the poem offers — looking at a face and becoming wise.
Water is the controlling image. The speaker is a pool, so “sways” in “a dear, swift grace / Sways in my body” belongs to water as much as to flesh. “Calm” then stills the surface just at the moment a reflection can be seen clearly. “Deep” in “look deep into my face” joins the depth of the pool, the depth of an intimate gaze, and the risk of drowning that the myth carries. The poem also uses the language of making: “carved,” “wrought,” “images.” These terms belong to sculpture and craft, so the speaker’s denial of having been “wrought perfectly” matters. She is not a finished art object; she is the medium in which the beloved becomes art. The repeated word “see” becomes central. The mirror exists so that “you may see / Yourself most intimately and alone.” That phrase is both tender and isolating: the beloved is with the mirror, yet locked inside his own image.
The poem’s significance lies in its reframing of the Narcissus story. Traditionally, Narcissus is punished for loving his reflection. Here the reflection is not a delusion to be condemned but a gift: the pool promises to show him “how wonderful and starlike you can be.” “Starlike” adds an unexpected cosmic note, turning a face into a heavenly body. Yet the final lines are ambiguous. The mirror whispers “tremble” and “look deep,” and the last line gives Narcissus’s own voice: “Touch me and cry, ‘How beautiful I am!’” The quoted words are his, but they are framed by the speaker’s sentence. That framing suggests she is not merely passive; she stages his self-discovery, perhaps even his self-infatuation. The poem therefore asks whether love is the creation of beauty in another, or the erasure of the one who does the reflecting. By making the mirror the “I” of the sonnet, Welles turns the myth inward: the self who says “I have no beauty” is also the one who makes beautiful self-seeing possible. That double role gives the sonnet its lingering, unsettled power.