Thus Psyche became at last united to Cupid, and in due time they had a daughter born to them whose name was Pleasure.

The fable of Cupid and Psyche is usually considered allegorical.  The Greek name for a butterfly is Psyche, and the same word means the soul.  There is no illustration of the immortality of the soul so striking and beautiful as the butterfly, bursting on brilliant wings from the tomb in which it has lain, after a dull, grovelling, caterpillar existence, to flutter in the blaze of day and feed on the most fragrant and delicate productions of the spring.  Psyche, then, is the human soul, which is purified by sufferings and misfortunes, and is thus prepared for the enjoyment of true and pure happiness.

In works of art Psyche is represented as a maiden with the wings of a butterfly, along with Cupid, in the different situations described in the allegory.

Milton alludes to the story of Cupid and Psyche in the conclusion of his “Comus”: 

    “Celestial Cupid, her famed son, advanced,
     Holds his dear Psyche sweet entranced,
     After her wandering labors long,
     Till free consent the gods among
     Make her his eternal bride;
     And from her fair unspotted side
     Two blissful twins are to be born,
     Youth and Joy; so Jove hath sworn.”

The allegory of the story of Cupid and Psyche is well presented in the beautiful lines of T. K. Harvey: 

    “They wove bright fables in the days of old,
       When reason borrowed fancy’s painted wings;
     When truth’s clear river flowed o’er sands of gold,
       And told in song its high and mystic things! 
     And such the sweet and solemn tale of her
       The pilgrim heart, to whom a dream was given,
     That led her through the world,—­Love’s worshipper,—­
       To seek on earth for him whose home was heaven!

    “In the full city,—­by the haunted fount,—­
       Through the dim grotto’s tracery of spars,—­
     ’Mid the pine temples, on the moonlit mount,
       Where silence sits to listen to the stars;
     In the deep glade where dwells the brooding dove,
       The painted valley, and the scented air,
     She heard far echoes of the voice of Love,
       And found his footsteps’ traces everywhere.

    “But nevermore they met since doubts and fears,
       Those phantom shapes that haunt and blight the earth,
     Had come ’twixt her, a child of sin and tears,
       And that bright spirit of immortal birth;
     Until her pining soul and weeping eyes
     Had learned to seek him only in the skies;
     Till wings unto the weary heart were given,
     And she became Love’s angel bride in heaven!”

The story of Cupid and Psyche first appears in the works of Apuleius, a writer of the second century of our era.  It is therefore of much more recent date than most of the legends of the Age of Fable.  It is this that Keats alludes to in his “Ode to Psyche”: