Roughly halfway through Lucrece, Shakespeare's sophomore epyllion of 1594 and one of the few narrative poems he would ever compose, the narrator provides what Jonathan Bate has called ‘temporal punctuation’ for the titular heroine's complaint: he does so with an allusion to the womancum- nightingale Philomela, whose violent tragedy of kidnapping, sexual assault, and mutilation is relayed in Book 6 of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Noting the approach of ‘blushing morrow’ as ‘solemn night … descend[s] / To ugly hell’, Shakespeare's narrator declares Lucrece a ‘lamenting Philomel’ in a reference that, it has been observed, ‘seems designed to create syntactical parallels between the two violated women’. A mere seven stanzas later, the Shakespearean heroine reaffirms this affinity, for she proceeds to address Philomela directly:

In these lines, Shakespeare's ‘cloudy Lucrece’ not only aligns her own rape with that of this legendary victim, but she also attributes the nightingale's characteristic aversion to the dawn – like her own antipathy towards ‘Revealing day’ – to the bird's parallel desire to avoid the shame of diurnal Visibility.