Hylas, in the Greek myth, is a youth taken by nymphs as he was taking water from a spring. This myth resembles others from Greece, in which the goddess as siren, either in the form of bird-women singing from an island shore; or as fishwomen in the waves, lures young men to their doom. In each of the myths, there is the suggestion that the seduced victim went willingly, blissfully, to his destruction.

In Hylas the three natures of the goddess are shown. As the seven nymphs, she is at once Spring, the childbride with flowers in her hair; Aphrodite the seductress, and Atropos the life-ender, who will love the handsome youth to death when (not if, for she is irresistible) he is drawn into her waters.

In his very English painting, Waterhouse uses an Irish version of the myth which associates the goddess with watery fens; pools and bogs. This myth can be given a more grisly interpretation than was given by the Pre-Raphaelites...across Celtic Europe, the bodies of apparently ritually-sacrificed men have been found preserved since antiquity by bog waters. Whether in Britain or Scandinavia, the binding (five-fold bond) and the three-fold manner of death (strangulation; throatcutting and drowning), as well as the place, a watery wild, seem to indicate that the men were (perhaps willing) offerings to the goddess, in a Celtic version of the Mediterranean rite in the grove.