Daphne immediately commenced her transformation into a laurel tree ("Laurus nobilis"): Even this did not quench Apollo's ardour, and as he embraced the tree, he felt her heart still beating. He then declared: Upon hearing his words, Daphne bends her branches, approving his decision. A version of the attempt on Daphne's sworn virginity that has been less familiar since the Renaissance was narrated by the Hellenistic poet Parthenius, in his "Erotica Pathemata", "The Sorrows of Love". Parthenius' tale, based on the Hellenistic historian Phylarchus, was known to Pausanias, who recounted it in his "Description of Greece" (2nd century AD). In this,
The Wood Nymph the "erotic harmonic vocabulary" of "Tristan und Isolde" in the third section and the "motive of the forbidden question" from "Lohengrin" in the funereal march from the finale. In light of Sibelius's "Nietzschean response" to Wagner's operas (initially enamored, Sibelius by July 1894 had repudiated Wagner's ideas as "calculated" and "manufactured"), such observations are of particular interest in that they illustrate the extent to which Sibelius, at the time of "The Wood Nymph", had not yet succeeded in breaking with the German master. A few musicologists have speculated that "The Wood Nymph" is potentially autobiographical. Murtomäki, most notably, has argued