ALL THAT TO SAY: I never know how to come back when I decide I'm going to go and then change my mind. I am the definition of commitment issues. "YOU (you) don't really wanna STAY (no), but YOU (you) don't really wanna GO-oh" sort of thing. call me alexander.
my tangents, man. this needs to stop. let me get it together.
when I was smoll and still schooling at the home, one of the books that's lasted as a favorite was d'aulaire's book of greek myths. it's a huge treasure-trove of, ha, greek myths and I've loved them ever since whenever that was—a good ten years ago at this point. one of my favorite stories—so sweet, so sad—was the myth of hades and persephone. I loved the pathos of hades' loneliness, persephone's innocence, his sort of terrible, sort of creepily sweet abduction: a little hopeless, because how could she fit in with his realm? but of course he longs for life. it's selfish, but totally understandable.
it's terribly sad how much her mother misses and mourns her, and terrible that persephone is imprisoned and tricked into eating seeds from the underworld so she always has to come back. when I first read the story, I felt this indignation towards the typically selfish god who tricks others into giving him what he wants at their own expense. it was like phantom of the opera the way it almost ended, which is of course the enduring charm of PtO, because he doesn't keep her. buuuut nooooo for hades, and there's a reason nobody believes in the greek gods anymore. gee, I wonder why they broke up.
but as I got older, I felt a small tugging in my shipper heart for the two. what if persephone wasn't all that stupid, and didn't mind being queen of the realm—having a dark, quiet god who loved only her? he didn't seem so terrible. ...but I wasn't writing any fanfiction about it.
recently, I've come across some other books whose authors apparently thought of the same thing. (personally: not a fan. they just aren't that good, as far as I've skimmed.) it was an interesting coincidence to find carol tufts' poem "Hades and Persephone" yesterday; I was first indifferent, then intrigued, and it's now been entered in my poem-collection book where I keep all these precious things in one analog spot.
Ravishing, he rose at her from the gaping earth
like nothing she had ever beheld
blooming there before...
"ravishing" is an interesting word: 'to ravish' has unpleasant historical connotations of rape, but has been softened over the years to something along the lines of 'laid prostrate by'. you're taken over, enraptured; sort of how "thrall" used to be synonymous with "slave" but now "enthralled" creates a positive, less physical twist—you're taken with something to the point of serving it. someone or something "ravishing" is overwhelmingly beautiful; but there's still an undercurrent of darkness (darkness, haha, cuz this is hades) in google's synonyms: 'to ravish,' definition two, is to "enrapture, enchant, delight, charm, entrance, enthrall, captivate." it's not totally of the self, it's a little bit magicked. (also, notice the 'enthralled' entry. that was seriously a coincidence to my mention.) he takes her by surprise, and is oddly attractive to her.
and look, it's only been the first word.
I love how tufts uses "ravishing," "rose," and "blooming" in connotation with the lord of the underworld. he's dark and gloomy and cold and quiet and—not evil; not death; but not exactly good either. and here persephone perceives him through the language of light and flowers, the only way she knows (even though "rose" is a verb here. he still "rose...blooming there". I think tufts knew what she was doing).
his "bleak shadow" begins to wither all the life around him. oddly enough, this isn't terrifying. tufts doesn't make him an ombra-like spirit-sucker, he just appears and sadly kills everything he touches. hades feels resigned here, even though he's active in coming for the goddess. this might be from tufts' use of present participles: -ing words, a little less active than if "his bleak shadow / strangled the insipid flowers, / bleached the easy green from the grass". it kind of happens, and he's not necessarily trying.
the first clue that persephone isn't scared and doesn't mind is I think "Ravishing...". it's not "Terrifying, he rose at her...". if you take "ravishing" in the same sense as "strangling" and "bleaching," then he's not trying to attract her, which makes it a little less romantic. he comes to find persephone, kills the flowers he moves across, and happens to make her attracted to him—but it's never about her or what she wants. but okay, let's not go that direction just yet.
the second clue that persephone isn't scared and doesn't mind is his "relieving her of birdsong and bouquets". that may even be the third, if you count the "insipid flowers" he kills—if these are her thoughts describing the situation. she's mesmerized by this new kind of "flower", and all the world she's known till now is dull and something of a burden. did she think it was a burden before? did it only become a burden when he appeared? but at this point, he's ravishing, and that's all that matters in infatuation.
does persephone know he's from the Deep Dark Depths of the Realm of the Dead? is this a death-wish? is life too heavy, too rich for her? I was reminded of janet loxley lewis's "Austerity," whose narrator "Hated the life in the turfy meadow, / hated the heavy, sensuous bees." the beautiful descriptions of growing life—"birdsong and bouquets, / the rows of oats blowing silver in the sun"—are all of a sudden a responsibility persephone seems weary of. wallace stevens offers a similar commentary on death and life that slowly unfolds in "Sunday Morning":
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
and so instead of an aggressive hades swooping in and snatching up a terrified, helpless, innocent, life-loving maiden with a disney-like bird landing on her welcoming finger... we get a woman, tired of ceaseless life, intrigued, irresistibly drawn, suddenly captivated by a new phenomenon—who approaches quietly and sternly and "relieves" her of her living burdens.
"so she let him take her in his shrouding arms." if that wasn't a straight-up message that persephone wants to die, gosh, I don't know what you want to hear. still, there's an element of autonomy: he doesn't grab her, he embraces her, and she lets him. this is so gentle, so quiet; unannounced and unassuming. the "stricken garlands" slide from her and she disappears underground as a peacock wails and the earth closes over her head.
—two things here: more -ing words and peacocks.
I don't know what tufts is trying to convey with the constant inging, but one -ing word appears in every single line of this first stanza, and I think that's important. to me, the -ings frequently indicate an essentialness to their descriptors: hades is in essence ravishing. he doesn't try, he just is. his shadow is strangling, bleaching, relieving; his arms are shrouding. the peacock isn't necessarily always, in essence, "beginning", but at the same time, this first stanza is strongly reminiscent of a moment frozen in time, like keats's "ode on a grecian urn". keats uses -ings, too, because this is all constantly yet never happening—both at once.
that's the joy:
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
and that's also the tragedy of this "Cold Pastoral": "Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, / Though winning near the goal" (both emphases mine).
there are more interesting word-choice parallels between keats and tufts here. take the first stanza (all bolding mine)(-ing! augh, it's contagious):
Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
...
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
we've already seen that persephone isn't quite the "maiden loth", but we also know that in the original myth she totes is, and that tufts is taking some flights of fancy here with her poetic license. so the narratives provide an interesting comparison. keats himself is contrasting the raucous hilarity of the envisioned party with the silence of the image on the urn; tufts is changing the story of a terrifying abduction to a gentle, silent interaction between the personifications of life and death: the lovely life, wearied, welcoming death as a relief. (welcoming. see what I did there.)
also peacocks. in my extensive research of peacock symbolism (read: 30-second use of the interwebs), apparently for a time in greek culture, peacocks represented immortality. (thanks to the d'aulaires, I already knew the story of argus and his 100 eyes (it's a good story, look it up), but that doesn't seem to relate.) if that's the case and tufts knew it, the peacock wailing as persephone goes "down once more to the dungeon of hades' black despair" is an interesting feature—persephone, a goddess, is immortal, but as the representative of life she's just been taken captive by death (or at least the guardian of the dead. hades wasn't literally the grim reaper. work with me here). does the peacock remind us that she can't actually die, that giving up her living rule on earth doesn't mean she gets to abscond forever? or is the peacock just a sad, eerie note, crying where persephone was silent? it almost mourns for her as she goes beneath "the sealing earth." it's a grave.
the peacock's cry—the second indication of sound in the poem, after the "birdsong" in line 6—is at least a final reminder of the sounds of earth. beneath, it is silent
...As if all trilling nature had loosed
Its rush of sound from around her
And she found herself begin
To weep
aren't the words themselves a beautiful whisper? from the rolling -ings to this nearly -ing-less section, replaced with "sh" and "ou" and "s": papery, rustling. quiet. persephone, still alive, -ings her way through the last half of the verse: "turning," "making," "budding," "cloying."
the line "Turning her eyes / from his untried kindnesses" confused me for awhile; it's one of those lines I feel but am not quite sure I actually understand. I think it's a further example of hades' good-guy (well; not-bad-guy) representation. he brings her down and—silently?*—offers further kindness (beyond the 'rescue' from life and responsibility). she merely turns away and cries, as if "she grieved / for the temperate pleasures he had undone" but actually from amazement and relief.
*interesting note. these two never talk. is this lack of communication part of hades' misunderstanding that she wants to go? are they somehow incapable of talking to one another? persephone I would absolutely expect to make noise, but is hades only able to be—wait for it—silent as the grave?
persephone isn't "half-sick of shadows," she's thoroughly sick of the real deal, "the ceaseless budding / and flowering, the ripeness / cloying at desire." it's like too real to be real; always summer and never christmas would get old pretty quickly. except that it wouldn't get old, because it's always young. I sort of understand how she feels.
remember that part of Tuck Everlasting where tuck takes winnie in the boat and explains life to her?
"But dying's part of the wheel, right there next to being born.... If I knowed how to climb back on the wheel, I'd do it in a minute. You can't have living without dying. So you can't call it living, what we got.... I want to grow again," he said fiercely, "and change. And if that means I got to move on at the end of it, then I want that, too.... Can you picture what that means? Forever? The wheel would keep on going round and round, the water rolling by to the ocean, but the people would have turned into nothing but rocks by the side of the road." (pg 64)persephone felt it in the always-living things around her; what is light without darkness? birth without death? what is persephone without hades? and here's an interesting line, "ripeness / cloying at desire." think back to keats:
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm, and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd
A burning forehead and a parching tongue.
keats's conclusion is that this frozenness is a blessing: the Bold Lover may always chase, but his love will always be fair. their physical passion will never die. it's not so bad, after all! persephone thinks otherwise. the constant budding and ripeness is cloying, too, and she longs for the cool quietness of death. as wallace stevens put it, "death, the mother of beauty."
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
to be forever the same is to be always incomplete.
I'll read into the poem a little bit here. "When at last he thought to offer" could be hades frantically (or as frantic as this quiet god gets) searching for something to make her happy. I like to imagine that here, in the darkness, he silently offers her the various inanimate fruits of his kingdom, suddenly placing them before her tearful face, and growing more desperate as he sees (what he thinks is) her sorrow for the world above. (love the grieve/believe word combo as well.)
now: it's the part of the story we've all been waiting for. hades offers persephone the definitive pomegranate. perhaps it's the most alive thing he can find in his underworld, and he hopes to bring a bit of her world to comfort her. pomegranates: in my extensive research of pomegranate symbolism (read: 30-second use of the interwebs), apparently these stood for some variety of life and death, immortality, and fertility—but this also appeared in the original, not just in tufts' work, so it really did mean something. the fruit symbol makes sense with a lot of the themes in the story and in the poem, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to piece those themes together, so I'm going to move on.
When at last he thought to offer
the split pomegranate, the clotted seeds
slick as beaded blood
in the sweating wound she made of him ...
this is the first time I'm genuinely disturbed. this is kind of graphic. not only does it feel subtly sexual, it also feels like something isn't quite right with our girl 'seph. cloying fruit felt overripe, warm, rotten, and the underworld felt cool and dry and safe. but all of a sudden it's wet and damp and she's sucking on a fruit that recalls the imagery of the "gaping earth" from the beginning. this doesn't feel wholesome anymore (I mean, if it ever did).
but let's keep it classy. hades is desperate to keep her. she made of him a sweating wound: is this his heart, broken and bleeding because of his love for her? let's say it is because I prefer that. my interpretation. you don't like it, you can go write your own.
... she brought his chilly hand to her lips
and sucked the musky fruit
enough to hold him those measured months
where he waited to possess once more
what had been lost to him --
"musky fruit." it's not fresh. it's not moderately alive. there is something very intimate about this action—she takes his hand in hers and uses it as a dish (almost like psyche cupping her hands to offer orual a drink). but she eats the seeds, and considering the words of the poem, it makes her something of an inside-out vampire: not death, feeding on lifeblood, this is life, feeding on deathblood. which is somehow a little insane and a little more creepy.
update: after letting this rest for a night and coming back—seriously, I can't stop thinking about this poem—I'm wondering if there's even more to the pomegranate. is it somehow this representation of hades? persephone makes of him a sweating wound, so the beaded blood is his, in a way. the fruit is musky, of the underworld; as he was "ravishing" and offered himself to her, now he offers her this fruit. that makes it seems like an extension of him. she eats these grains and they become both part of her and lost to him, although they also serve to bring her back ("As if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly knotted to a similar string in you. And if you were to leave I'm afraid that cord of communication would snap. And I have a notion that I'd take to bleeding inwardly").
as persephone is life, feeding on death, so hades is death, feeding on life. spoilers: he's preying on her, too, with his embrace.
tufts' poem is full of inversions. of course, we have persephone who loves hades, here, and accepts his advances; persephone who hates life; persephone who wants to stay in the underworld, though he thinks she wants to go; persephone who sucks musky fruit "slick as beaded blood"; and she eats "enough to hold him those measured months / where he waited". I don't know—if hades could get only one musky pomegranate to try to make her happy, maybe she realizes all she has to do is make it through this bloody trial to stay with him. maybe she eats the pomegranate not with enjoyment but because she wants "to hold him those measured months" and this is the only way.
so what had been lost to him?
the grainy fragrance of the living world,
and how?
the flush loveliness of summer
fading in his famished embrace.
-ing. look at it. the living world, fading. fading because he embraces it.
to hades, the living world is as beautiful as the dead world is to persephone. he loves her light; she loves his dark. he didn't try to bleach and strangle, but he can't help it, and he brought her down to have some life with him—but for all he knows, she cries to leave. she begins to wilt herself, "fading in his famished embrace"; "why should she give her bounty to the dead?"
so here's another inversion: instead of the pomegranate being persephone's traditional trap to return, the pomegranate becomes hades letting her go.
hades, as god of the underworld, provided balance. he kept the dead in line, and the dead had to be or, like tuck said, "You can't call it living, what we got." but an eternity of death is just as bad as an eternity of life, if you only see one and not the other. it leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd.
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk up on our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
persephone, in all her actions, longs for death: from accepting hades' embrace to eating the fruit of the underworld (which would seal her fate to remain). hades, in all his actions, longs for life, and the lost fragrance and beauty of the living world—which he can't help but kill. persephone herself fades in his famished embrace, and the pomegranate alone provides a heartbreaking compromise: they both must be alone to survive together.
update reprise (6 months later): I don't know if I agree with myself anymore. I focused a lot on hades in this analysis, but the poem is really about persephone. and the poem is really about persephone's devious trickery with hades: she "let" him take her, "ma[de] him believe", "made of him" "a sweating wound"—manipulates and lies to get what she wants. what does she want?
and another update, in march of 2020 (yup, still thinking): added all the wallace stevens quotes. would love to incorporate them fully, but that would be complicated, because stevens is arguing against christianity, which would have to be contrasted to the greek mythology in a whole other section of thought & analysis. he has his own amazing imagery inversions—comparing a garish living world to silent funeral processions, offering wide water versus living water, and using change as an argument against eternity—that deserve to be analyzed on their own, not just as a lens to examine something else.
all the same, keep it in mind next to tufts.
*in trying to come up with a good title for this post, I thought of "the pomegranate compromise" and couldn't stop my mind from thinking "the pomcom" and that is making me laugh harder than my clearly sophisticated sense of humor is comfortable with.
