This document summarizes and analyzes Rita Dove's collection of poems titled "Mother Love" which focuses on Greek myths. It discusses how two myths - Persephone and Demeter and Eurydice and Orpheus - deal with themes of love, separation, loss and grief. It specifically examines the myth of Orpheus who traveled to the underworld to rescue his wife Eurydice, only to lose her again when he looked back as they were leaving. The document analyzes how Dove's poem "Lamentations" draws from this myth and the pastoral tradition to convey a message about expressing grief through poetry or music.

1. Lamentations by Rita Dove . Presentation by A.Quest & O.Tennant
In the collection Mother Love, Rita Dove focuses briefly on the Greek myth of
Persephone and Demeter which is the primary myth of her collection while the second is of
Eurydice and Orpheus which also deals with the themes of obsessive love and separation,
loss and grieving. The myth states that Orpheus was half human being the son of a Prince
and a goddess that inspired him to be a great musician/poet. It is believed he received a
golden lyre from Apollo, the god of music with which Orpheus creates irresistible music.
Orpheus fell in love with the most beautiful maiden, Eurydice which led to marriage
between them. So deep was their love for each other that they could not live without each
other. Shortly after the wedding, disaster struck. Eurydice was walking in the meadow when
a viper stung and killed her. At her death she descended immediately to the underworld,
where Hades resides. Orpheus was in constable over the loss and emptiness that he felt. His
great love for Eurydice emboldened him and he descended into the fearful underworld to
persuade Hades and Persephone to allow her to return to the land of the living. It was not
easy task to move the dark, brooding and stony heart of Hades to let her go, but after
several attempts, his music which can sooth any woman, even the rocks and the flows of a
river softened the stony heart of Hades and his intractable will. Hades allowed Eurydice to
return with Orpheus on one condition. He was to lead the way and was not to look back for
her as he ascended. Just before he emerged from the underworld he looks back to ensure
that he beloved was following him, but she was still in Hades domain and the condition of
her release being broken. She was dragged back into the internal reigns. Orpheus could not
follow her back down because the gods would not allow a mortal to the world of the dead a
second time while he was alive. The lovers were forever separated. This myth specifically
demonstrates the ability of poetry to give expressive release to grieving and sorrow.
Doves poetic style is the way in which poems in the collection allude to parody amd
draw on other poems or creative works to convey their meaning in short demonstrating
their intertextuality. This feature if not restricted only to the Greek myth which give the
collection its structural and thematic integrity. The epigraph of part 6 “Now, for the first
time the god lifts his head, the fragments in me with their own music” is the final couplet
from Muriel Rukeyser’s sonnet “The Poem as Mask” thematically links with the myth of

2. Orpheus. The suggestion here is that of wholeness and restoration is only possible when
prefence is put aside. Mythologies are ways of perceiving the truth about ourselves and the
world.
The poem “Lamentation” is the poem most related to the myth of Orpheus and
Eurydice. The poem draws on the pastoral tradition – relation to music of shepherds and it
suggest that to deny music or poetry is to “deny this world”. The poem is a call to throw off
grief and return to the land of the living; it is an invitation to reengage life anew. To lament
is the act of expressing grieft. Here in the pastoral tradition, Orpheus music, in whatever
form, her the pipes of shepherds, is a consolation to be grasped and expression of our
nature, of our fullness in the world not that should not refused. The beauty of the lines has a
quiet authority:
Throw open the shutters
to your darkened residences:
can you hear the pipes playing,
their hunger shaking the olive branches?
To hear them sighing and not not answer
is to deny this world,..
Dove explains that “sonnets seem the proper mode for most of this work.. much has
been said about the many ways to ‘violate’ the sonnet in the service of American speech on
modern love or whatever.. the sonnet comforts even while its prim boarders are stultifying
one is constantly bumping up against Order. It is significant though, that in this sonnet if
abbreviated lines, the “silken/air” of lyric expression monologue is only allowed the octave
and that in the sestet the “brute tongue” of a common-sense voice takes over which shows
the polycocal persepective.