Whose cheek is this?

In the Greek myth, the Pleiades were the daughters of the Titan Atlas. There were seven daughters total, and all but one had children with gods. One telling of the myth recounts that the daughters all died by suicide because of grief over the death of their sisters, the Hyades. The Hyades were the five daughters of Atlas who had a different mother than the Pleiades. Another story surrounding the Pleiades “explains that after seven years of being pursued by Orion, a Boeotian giant, they were turned into stars by Zeus” (“Pleiades.” Britannica, 2022). The Pleiades remain as a grouping of stars in the constellation Taurus. In Dickinson’s poem, the speaker alludes to the Pleiades here: “I found her—‘pleiad’—in the woods” (Line 4). By referring to the girl/flower before them, the speaker associates the girl/flower with the idea of sisterhood and companionship. The object/person found in the woods also becomes associated with grief and objectification. By using the allusion to the Pleiades, the speaker reinforces the femininity of the entity before them and indicates that they have perhaps succumbed to either grief and/or patriarchal societal pressures, much like what affected the Pleiades.