Friday, June 10, 2016
Persephone Again––poem by Dorothy
PERSEPHONE AGAIN
Everyone wants to talk
about Persephone.
Especially the poets.
How she was grabbed
and carried off,
how she was kept in darkness
so many months,
while her mother searched everywhere,
waited for her darling
to come home.
Some say
the daughter
liked what had happened
(you know the story,
how women really want it
even when they say no),
others claim it is in fact
the mother who is at fault,
that it is she
who drove her daughter
away, forced her to
leave home and
flee into that hidden world,
because of her own impossible
demands.
And then of course
there are those
who read it as a simple
nature myth–three months of fertility and sun,
nine of winter and death
over the land.
What do I think?
I think she is the soul
of each of us,
going down to darkness and obscurity,
overwhelmed by despair,
then resurrecting like a flower
over and over
as the seasons return.
Dorothy Walters
(from "Penelope's Loom"
When the young girl Persephone was out picking flowers, she was abducted by Hades, King of the Underworld. There she was kept in confinement in the lower regions for nine months each year, although she was allowed to ascend to her home above for three months annually. Often the story has been interpreted as a simple nature myth, created to explain the yearly cycle of the seasons. However, other interpretations are possible from our own vantage.
