““Tithonus once, the tale was, rose-armed Dawn / love-smitten, carried off to the world’s end // handsome and young then,” reads a translation of Sappho’s 58th fragment. Tithonus, as Sappho tells us, was Eos’ lover; Eos, the Titan of dawn, garnered him immortality, but forgot to finagle agelessness. And so, “yet in time gray age / o’ertook him, husband of immortal wife.””
“Or, as British poet Alice Oswald tells the tale in her most recent book, Falling Awake (2016):
It is said that the dawn fell in love with Tithonus and asked Zeus to make him immortal, but forgot to ask that he should not grow old. Unable to die, he grew older and older until at last the dawn locked him in a room where he still sits babbling to himself and waiting night after night for her appearance.”
“Oswald’s rendition of Tithonus’ miserable affair with the dawn comprises the second half of Falling Awake, which contains one long piece, “Tithonus,” and one short lyric, “And so he goes on.” Oswald calls “Tithonus” a 46-minute-long performance of the “sound of Tithonus meeting the dawn at midsummer.” Forty-six minutes, here, stands for the amount of time it takes on this particular Midsummer’s Day (the longest day of the year) for the dawn to turn into the full flush of morning; the poem begins at 4:17 a.m. (“when the sun is six degrees below the horizon”) and ends, then, at 5:03 a.m.”
“To be someone who can only be rendered as a sound of one’s own repeated actions. To be someone who perpetually meets the lover he has known for eons. To be someone who is wholly devoted to a transitive and always-dying time of day, the shoreline between day and night. To be someone whose story can best be told during a particularly anticipatory shoreline that precedes the year’s longest glare.”
“Of all of the things that Oswald’s Tithonus is, the fact that he both ages and is unable to die seems to be the most pedestrian thing about him. So too, in a way, is the fact that he is Eos’ lover (a fact that seems, in Oswald’s version, to be in the past tense; Eos appears to have tired of him). Oswald makes ordinary the two distinctive narrative points that structure the lore from which she pulls — and makes astonishingly strange, and startlingly specific, almost everything else.”