Natasha Trethewey penned “Myth” as an elegy to her deceased mother. In her grief, Trethewey turns every element of the poem into an echo chamber for her feelings of despair. The title, punctuation, rhyme scheme, repetition, and even the inclusion of Greek mythology, all serve the same purpose, to intensify the underlying thematic elements of death, loss, and grief. The hallmark of good writing is the ability to transmit feeling/emotion to the reader. Trethewey accomplishes this goal in “Myth” by turning each part of the poem into an amplifier of her emotions.
Trethewey wrote “Myth” in a variant form of the Villanelle. Traditionally, a Villanelle would consist of nineteen lines broken into four stanzas consisting of three line tercets and a final fifth stanza consisting of four lines called a quatrain. The traditional Villanelle has two rhymes that repeat throughout. The repetitive rhyme scheme creates a sense of obsession, dislocation, and despair. Terthewey chose to write this modified Villanelle in order to incorporate a palindrome as another mechanism for magnifying the theme of the poem. In order to accommodate the palindrome, Trethewey employs a clever method of maintaining the repetition of sounds and overall effect of the traditional Villanelle. “Myth” is made up of six stanzas consisting of three line tercets. The “ing” sound repeats in the first and third line of each stanza, and the “llow” sound repeats in the second line of each stanza. The punctuation used in “Myth” is another element of form that Trethewey uses to convey the content (message) of the poem. In the first nine lines of the poem, Terthewey omits terminal stops in a third of the lines. This enjambment of lines creates a sort of rushed, breathless reading of the poem and is a reflection of the mental state the speaker must experience during her dreaming state where she sees her mother. The second nine lines are all terminally stopped giving the impression of a more halting finality to the lines. The use of enjambed and end stopped lines is another tool used by Trethewey to reinforce the message of the poem.
In the fourth line of the poem, the speaker in the poem invokes the name of Erebus, an ancient Greek word for “the dark region of the underworld” (Mays, 637). Erebus invokes the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice because Erebus is the place of darkness that Orpheus returns to when she is lost by Eurydice. Interestingly, Trethewey uses the punctuation of the lines to reflect the journey of Orpheus and Eurydice. As the poem opens, the speaker is talking about sleep. Generally, sleep occurs during darkness, but it is also the place that Orpheus and Eurydice ascend from. The enjambment of the lines in the first three stanzas creates a rushed feeling because there are no periods or commas to tell the reader when to pause. One might imagine this being the sensation experienced by Orpheus and Eurydice as the ascended out of darkness.. As Orpheus descended back into Erebus, and as Eurydice heard her final “farewell,” one may imagine the finality with which Eurydice knew he had lost his love and likewise understand his reluctance to accept such a fate. The terminal stops in lines ten through eighteen reinforcenot only the finality of the speaker’s loss, but also serve as a symbolic representation of Orpheus’ decent into darkness. In this way, Trethewey uses simple punctuation to mimic the rise and fall of Orpheus and Eurydice. In essence, the form of thepoem operates as a mirror (just as the second half is a mirror of the first half) of not only the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, but also the experience of the speaker as she moves from a dreaming to a waking state. In this instance, just as with the choice of a Villanelle and the inclusion of the palindrome, Trethewey has found an unique way to make form and content one.
While there is much to say about the contents of the poem, it is only necessary to point out a few major features of the work. “I was asleep while you were dying” is repeated in the first and the last line. Regardless of the passing of time and regardless of everything the speaker says in between he/she ends up in the same place. One can almost feel the guilt and grief the speaker is experiencing. Each day the speaker must “forsake” (Trethewey, 9) and leave behind her loved one in a “rift, a hollow” (Trethewey, 2,17) that the speaker feels he/she is responsible for. Also, lines 9-10 reach across the rift on the physical paper (the original of the poem has a large gap between the two section that is separated by an asterisk) the poem is printed on. “Again and again” (Trethewey, 9) and “again and again” (Trethewey, 10) cause the speaker to experience the nearly unbearable grief and despair of crossing into the darkness and seeing the lost loved one.
The content of the poem also contains numerous allusions to archetypes that make the story that the speaker is telling universally understood. These archetypes include the unhealable wound (the loss of a loved one), the journey (the speaker’s daily trek into the abyss and her ever increasing knowledge that her loved one is lost forever), the use of darkness (as a reflection of the speaker’s despair). Because these archetypes are universally understood to be a fact of life that most people will experience, the emotions experienced by the speaker are also experienced by the reader.
Additionally, by utilizing these archetypes and associating the speaker’s lost loved one with an ancient Greek myth, the speaker elevates her loved one to the status of myth, hence the title. A phenomenon that is not uncommon. Family members tend to glorify the dead above what they did in life. The use of myth and archetypes draws the reader into the world of the speaker by making his/her experience relatable. However,Orpheus and Eurydice is not the only myth present in the poem. The word “forsaking” (Trethewey, 9,10) is used twice in the poem. It is not difficult to discern the link between this word and the myth of Jesus Christ. As Jesus was dying on the cross, he is said to have yelled out “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (NKJ, Matt. 27:46). Each of these myths and archetypes serve not only to bring the reader and speaker in harmony, but also to tell a story.
In a traditional villanelle, the story is told through a series of refrains, where the reader becomes increasingly aware of the dilemma and some answer to the dilemma is provided in the last quatrain. However, Trethewey use of a non-conventional villanelle and palindrome essentially turn the last nine lines into a sort of resolution to the dilemma presented in the first nine lines, much like the closing quatrain is intended to do in the traditional Villanelle. Trethewey accomplishes this task by making minor changes to the second half of the poem. The main changes occur in the punctuation or terminal stops. “Again and again, this constant forsaking.” (Trethewey, 9) is changed to “Again and again, this constant forsaking:” (Trethewey, 10). Line nine has a full stop period at the end of it, as if the speaker could not possibly endure this pain again; however, when Trethwey rewrote the line she replaced the period with a colon, indicating that there may be something beyond the pain. The order of the lines is also reversed which changes the meaning of each tercet. The third stanza ends with “constant forsaking” because for the speaker there is nothing else. But in the second half of the palindrome, the speaker opens with “constant forsaking” and moves beyond it. Each of the enjambed lines in the first part of the poem receive end stops in the second part as an indication that the speaker is slowly coming to realize death is final.
Every story, in order to be successful, must create a kinship between the reader and the character(s) in the story. Through the use of archetypes, common myths, haunting diction, and unique form, Natasha Trethewey created more than a bond between reader and speaker, she created a knowing.
