Alexis

Alexis is the absent center of Corydon's song, a young master whose beauty makes the shepherd rehearse baskets of lilies, baskets of narcissus, and every rustic gift he can imagine. He never speaks, never arrives, and that silence is the point: desire in the Eclogues often addresses itself to someone who is not listening. His indifference turns Corydon's pastoral from a landscape of plenty into a confession of insufficiency.