These lines indicate some of the problems. First, with the "swimming eyes" we get a whiff of the boundless, unambiguous pathos that surrounds her. The "cruel fates" let us know that she is a pure victim, innocent of any responsibility for her doom. She is very close to Death's Maiden, the youngster in the Dance of Death who was turned from a Renaissance memento mori into one of the cliches of the Romantic Movement, from doomed, corrupt, youthful sensuality to virginal suffering, and who wound up in this form as a popular kitsch heroine in the 19th century. Classicist Thomas Palaima says of these lines, "she is the purest and most self-effacing victim, one who cannot comprehend her identity except through thou [Orpheus, who is addressed]."

But she is not an utter void. She exists alongside of Persephone with her strong attachment to the underworld, a place that our century has made the repository of images of psychic truth. The Christian culture that inherited her considers dying and rebirth, the death of the old self and the rebirth of the new, as the prerequisite for salvation and enlightenment. Her death holds the promise of dying into life with her vision cleared--since she dies twice and can speak as one doubly illuminated.

While it is Eurydice's fate to be seen only in relation to Orpheus, we see Orpheus (especially in the Roman poets) only fleetingly enchanting the stones, beasts, gods and trees. The powerful, dramatic scenes that characterize him involve women and death--they are with Eurydice and the Maenads. When we see Orpheus and Eurydice together, the sympathy is always with her. The pattern of trouble with women that seems to define him lets us know not only that he is a man, but that he is a poet.

Her association with Orpheus remains part of her appeal to poets, and of her undoing as well. Because of this link, she can speak to both the power and the limits, failures and pretensions, of poetry. Yet there are more poems by women identifying with Orpheus and the spirit of poetry than there are about Eurydice. The fatal turn of Orpheus leading to her second death, his failure to save her, makes her attractive to any poet wanting to do justice to a rotten encounter with a self-absorbed male poet. In a century when the understanding of women's lives, especially as poets and as wives, is changing so dramatically, confusingly, poignantly, her voice can be very attractive to an artist once she is transformed from the passive, sentimental victim to something else, usually a defiant, angry woman, or one more passionate about death than love.

Louise Glück states, with characteristic elegance and precision, the artistic peril of dealing with victimhood that faces the poet who might consider using a voice such as that of Eurydice, in her recent review of autobiographical books by Sharon Olds and Linda McCarriston in Threepenny Review (#54, Summer 93). She calls this danger "a kind of erosion, undermining the present with the past, substituting for the shifts and approximations and variety of anecdote the immutable fixity of fate, and for curiosity regarding an unfolding future, absolute knowledge of that future." Identification with a fossilized figure of pathos can lead us to slight what Glück sets up as the requirement for a living art. "When the force and misery of compulsion are missing, when the scar is missing, the ambivalence which seeks, in the self, responsibility--the collusive, initiating desire which must have been present for punishment to occur; the sense that it is better, in a way, that the self be at fault than that the world be evil--when ambivalence toward the self is missing, the written recreation, no matter how artful, forfeits emotional authority."

Robert Browning's Eurydice to Orpheus (1864) overcomes the passivity of Eurydice by making her the angelic suicide, happy victim of her own virtuous and serene infatuation with her husband, and her death the joyful reward of a passionate exchange of glances. His glance, especially, is her protection and reward. The poem is a fragment spoken by her. The ecstatic self-sacrificing vision of Browning's Eurydice is shared by few in the twentieth century.

But give them me, the mouth, the eyes, the brow!

Let them once more absorb me! one look now

Will lap me round forever, not to pass

Out of its light, though darkness lie beyond:

Hold me but safe again within the bond

Of one Immortal look! All woe that was,

Forgotten, and all terror that may be,

Defied,--no past is mine, no future: look at me!

The movement of consciousness from Browning to Rilke, a mere forty years later, is enormous. Rilke defines Eurydice for the 20th century in his persuasive and influential poem of 1904, Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes. (She is only an abstraction in the Sonnets to Orpheus). Orpheus is the first figure we see in the poem. The emphasis is on his boyish impatience and his sense of his poetry and his own work--which, in the setting of the death and return of Eurydice, defines him as entirely self-absorbed.

In front, the slender man in the blue cloak--

mute, impatient, looking straight ahead.

In large, greedy, unchewed bites his walk

devoured the path; his hands hung at his sides,

tight and heavy, out of the falling folds,

no longer conscious of the delicate lyre

which had grown into his left arm like a slip

of roses grafted onto an olive tree.

His senses felt as though they were split in two:

His sight would race ahead of him like a dog,

stop, come back, then rushing off again

would stand impatient at the path's next turn,--

but his hearing, like an odor, stayed behind

Sometimes it seemed to him as though it reached

back to the footsteps of those other two

who were to follow him, up the long path home.

But then, once more, it was just his own steps' echo,

or the wind inside his cloak that made the sound.

He said to himself, they had to be behind him;

said it aloud and heard it fade away.

They had to be behind him, but their steps

were ominously soft. If only he could

turn around, just once (but looking back

would ruin this entire work, so near

completion), then he could not fail to see them,

those other two who followed him so softly:

(translated by Stephen Mitchell)

This is a mocking, affectionate and yet ominous portrait of the poet with his fears, insecurities, restless intelligence, and with the sense of Eurydice as merely part of his work, his project of retrieval. The comparison of his sight to an impatient, barely controlled dog softens the mockery. He is childlike and feminine as well: Eurydice was so loved that from his lyre "there came/ more lament than from all lamenting women." Rilke reminds us that lament is women's business with the word "Klagefrauen"--a German compound noun coined for the occasion (unlike the very common gerund and noun of the English translation) that forces the connection. Lamenting women then broaden in the song of this childish, impatient egotist into a lament-world and a lament-heaven.

A woman so loved that from one lyre there came

more lament than from all lamenting women;

that a whole world of lament arose, in which

all nature reappeared; forest and valley,

road and village, field and stream and animal;

and that around this lament world, even as

around the other earth, a sun revolved

and a silent star-filled heaven, a lament-

heaven, with its own disfigured stars--:

So greatly was she loved.

The queer, dislocated, ironic focus in this passage narrows on the lamenter Orpheus and his act of creation, and Eurydice is only reflected in his song. But after this point the poem takes a remarkable turn, and we see her as if for the first time with an almost hallucinatory clarity, not as the subject of mourning but as one taken up with her new--one is tempted to say--"life," meaning, of course, her death. It is so engrossing to her, it forms the center of her consciousness. Her old world, associated with Orpheus, has vanished, and no longer interests her. Orpheus, or whatever his name is, has become an intruder. Unlike Orpheus, she is without impatience:

But now she walked beside the graceful god,

her steps constricted by the trailing graveclothes,

uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.

She was deep within herself, like a woman heavy

with child, and did not see the man in front

or the path ascending steeply into life.

Deep within herself. Being dead

filled her [like] fulfillment. Like a fruit

suffused with its own mystery and sweetness,

she was filled with her vast death, which was so new,

she could not understand that it had happened.

This is a new vision of Eurydice moving into her own absorbing world, directly transforming the kitsch figurine of the dead maiden whose longing for life is full of infinite pathos, whose stand against death makes stones weep against their better judgement, into something new and deeply disturbing. Death absorbs her, and we must note how contradictory the imagery is here: two similes suggest her state is like fertility, pregnancy, ripeness. The metaphor asserts it is fulfillment with death. The tension between simile and metaphor keeps the duality of her death vividly alive. She is not impatient for life, or for anything else. She is beyond time and moves back toward life without the required joy or even anticipation of joy, because

She had come into a new virginity

and was untouchable; her sex had closed

like a young flower at nightfall, and her hands

had grown so unused to marriage that the god's

infinitely gentle touch of guidance

hurt her, like an undesired kiss.

This is Eurydice rising from the dead, led by Hermes toward the light, following her husband Orpheus. This is before he has turned. She has her own world, closed from him and the closure of her sex in death is a cruel parody of innocence. This is not a scene of virtuously repressed innocent yearning but near insensibility and possession by death. The closed flower and the undesired kiss are not sweet.

She was no longer that woman with blue eyes

who once had echoed through the poet's songs,

no longer the wide couch's scent and island,

and that man's property no longer.

She was loosened like long hair,

poured out like fallen rain,

shared like a limitless supply.

She was already root.

She is free of him--loose, poured, shared--the images suggest the body's scattering and dissolution. She is root--the poem begins with a description of the underworld as a mine of souls, roots among which the blood moves toward the world of men, so she is part of the structure of Hades. This is indigenous, chthonic--a very active and organic vision of death. The consciousness in Eurydice's possession by death is very like life.

And when, abruptly,

the god put out his hand to stop her, saying,

with sorrow in his voice: He has turned around--,

she could not understand, and softly answered

Who?

Far away,

dark before the shining exit-gates,

someone or other stood, whose features were

unrecognizable. He stood and saw

how, on the strip of road among the meadows,

with a mournful look, the god of messages

silently turned to follow the small figure

already walking back along the path,

her steps constricted by the trailing graveclothes,

uncertain, gentle and without impatience.

In every sense she is separated from Orpheus. She no longer recognizes him. The equivocal note at the end is one we will see again. Is her mind dissolved, along with her body? Is this death as scattering and ending as we always dreaded it would be, or is her consciousness moved into an impersonal and absolute realm where the answer to the question Who? is unimportant? The answer lies in the clarity, wholeness, distinctness, of the image of Eurydice that we see through Orpheus' eyes in these closing lines of the poem, but it is unstated beyond that. There are many qualities in this new vision of Eurydice in the poems that followed it: her intimate connection to death and the underworld, and repeatedly, her shaking free from Orpheus, the self-absorbed male poet, the boy poet.

From this point, it is mostly women who have taken up the voice of Eurydice, and while Rilke's influence is pervasive, it is not unmodified. About a dozen years later H.D. wrote Eurydice, reversing the dramatic thrust of Rilke's poem: her heroine is eager for life, angry at Orpheus, and frees herself in order to embrace the underworld. The poem as we know it has probably evolved from a biographical impetus revealed in her roman a clef, Bid me to Live, about her early years in London before and during the Great War. The Orpheus immediately behind the poem is D.H. Lawrence, who at this period was enlisting women as disciples, and trying to operate as a domineering literary advisor to H.D. He may well be responsible for the disappearance of the voice of Orpheus from the poem, having convinced H.D. that she should stick to the female voice that she knew. Her consent to this, despite her argument that he portrayed women convincingly in the novels, lets us know that the argument for autonomy in the poem contains an implied argument for her own embattled artistic integrity. Behind the figure of Lawrence are Pound and Richard Aldington, her husband-in-the-act-of-leaving-her. Everyone was telling her what to do with her art and her life in those years and her standing as woman and artist was embattled and very complex.

Out of this emotional stew of submission and defiance the poem was born. It begins in defiance:

So you have swept me back,

I who could have walked with the live souls

above the earth,

I who could have slept among the live flowers

at last;

so for your arrogance

and your ruthlessness

I am swept back

where dead lichens drip

dead cinders upon moss of ash;

so for your arrogance

I am broken at last,

I who had lived unconscious,

who was almost forgot;

if you had let me wait

I had grown from listlessness

into peace,

if you had let me rest with the dead,

I had forgot you

and the past.

This anger is new. Virgil's Eurydice complains in the four eloquent lines quoted about the madness that seizes Orpheus, but she does not blame him because she says that he, too, is the victim of cruel fate. H.D.'s Eurydice excoriates the arrogant and ruthless lover who has left her and sent her back into the underworld after disturbing her peace there. Orpheus is never addressed as a poet or artist of any sort in this poem--no song, no lyre. In the first section she complains in a flood of blame that she is broken by the underworld. The overt argument here blames him for reawakening life only to send her back again, but in the reference to her unconsciousness there is the possibility of an undercurrent of complaint about the unawakened woman's peaceful, unconscious life that is disturbed by art. One can only suggest this tentatively by bringing the traditional Orpheus into the poem, because "unconscious" as used here means simply unaware. It distorts the phrase "lived unconscious" to have it refer to the unconscious mind. By the end of the poem, this welcome peace of death is transformed into another, more conscious choice of the underworld as her true domain.

The second section of the poem follows up the suggestion of abandonment by a lover. Hell still punishes:

why did you turn back,

that hell should be reinhabited

of myself thus

swept into nothingness?

...

why did you bend your face

caught with the flame of the upper earth

above my face?

She accuses Orpheus of seeing her only as a reflection of his own presence--a reminder of Rilke's view of Orpheus. The poem then turns to a celebration and lament for the earth's feminine beauties, for Flora, and especially for the blue and gold aspects of the crocus, the male-female flower. Behind H.D.'s gold crocuses and saffron are Pound's "gilded phalloi of the crocuses"--that is, the saffron--and the blue crocuses are the feminine "depth upon depth"--all very genital. The flowers suggest a mystical sexual union that she would have dared, had she returned to earth, to embody, to breathe in:

if I could have caught up from the earth,

the whole of the flowers of the earth,

if I could have breathed into myself

the very golden crocuses

and the red,

and the very golden hearts of the first saffron,

the whole of the golden mass,

the whole of the great fragrance,

I could have dared the loss.

This is not Flora's mystical union with her Kingdom. That does not risk loss. This is fully human. Life on earth is a sexual dare against the arrogant and ruthless Orpheus, and yet the specific biographical figures (Pound, Lawrence, Aldington) are not hinted at here. The artist's role, the singer's role is suggested merely because it is Orpheus that she needs to overthrow in order to become herself, a woman, seer, poet:

you who have your own light,

who are to yourself a presence,

who need no presence...

The arrogance and the ruthlessness of the male artist are meant to be sufficiently understandable as stated. There is no plot or character here beyond the voice of Eurydice. The emotional authority of the poem relies entirely on the authenticity of her complaint. Yet far from seeing herself as the eternal victim, she announces her triumph in the concluding three sections of the poem where she celebrates the underworld and her place in it.

such loss is no loss...

such terror is no loss...

hell is no worse than your earth

above the earth,

hell is no worse,

no, nor your flowers,

nor your veins of light

nor your presence,

a loss;

my hell is no worse than yours

though you pass among the flowers and speak

with the spirits above earth.

This vindication of self and of hell elides from the language of the rejected lover to paradoxical affirmation, in the terms reserved for visionary poets. "I have more fervor/than you...I have more light." She celebrates her vulnerability: if Orpheus returned "I would sink into a place/ even more terrible than this," nevertheless

At least I have the flowers of myself,

and my thoughts, no god

can take that;

I have the fervor of myself for a presence

and my own spirit for light;

and my spirit with its loss

knows this;

though small against the black,

small against the formless rocks

hell must break before I am lost;

before I am lost,

hell must open like a red rose

for the dead to pass.

Charles Segal (in Orpheus, the Myth of the Poet) and Rachel Blau du Plessis (in Signets), both thoughtful commentators on this poem, have trouble accepting this hyperbolic conclusion. But it is not equivocal. It does say what it says, that her identification with hell is so absolute that she will not be lost until hell is lost, hell is harrowed, and loss would be a sexual opening for the saved. Like a rose, but not for her. She has embraced the erotic constrictions of hell with its own fervor, light, its flower of herself, closed. This is not a passionate underworld, the true home of Psyche, but the only counter-balance possible in the emotional pattern of the poem to its vision of ecstatic sexual union on earth, that can leave her with herself and her vision firmly possessed. In effect, she will be herself until the end of the world. The harrowing of hell is part of the apocalypse--her apocalypse.

The mood of Edith Sitwell's Eurydice of the early forties is entirely different. In a sequence of poems that uses the voice of the old woman (a favorite device of hers) she gives us a Eurydice full of forgiveness--so full, in fact, that she seems hardly bothered by her death, by Orpheus, by fate. She overflows with celebration and serene optimism about the benign design of it all, and as a reward she is provided with Orpheus again, as the sun.

Why do they weep for those in the silent Tomb,

Dropping their tears like grain? Her heart, that honeycomb

Thick Darkness, like a bear devours...See, all the gold is gone!

The cell of the honeycomb is six-sided...But there, in five cells of the senses,

Is stored all their gold...Where is it now? Only the wind of the Tomb can know.

But I feared not that stilled and chilling breath

Among the dust...Love is not changed by Death,

And nothing is lost and all in the end is harvest.

After such forgiveness, what matters? With such grandmothers we would happily be Little Match Girls. This is not Sitwell's best mode, which is elegant clowning in which the sententious voice seems, instead of grave and deliberate, utterly unconscious. This is a public spirited cheer-up poem written in England during the Blitz.

Adrienne Rich's poem I Dream I'm the Death of Orpheus is a deflection away from Eurydice to a woman of power, and invention called Death of Orpheus, drawn from Cocteau's film, Orphée. In the film she falls in love with Orpheus and wins him and then is forced to relinquish him to the sweet, wifely bourgeois Eurydice and to life, while Death of Orpheus is marched off to oblivion with her companion Heurtebise-Hermes, her accomplice, who has also broken the rules by falling in love with Eurydice. She loses in the end, but conducts herself with great restraint and power. Her style is very mannish and very classy. The plot of the Cocteau film sounds like the bittersweet noblesse oblige of a Somerset Maugham story with a woman filling the role of the valiant Englishman, but the sharp modern imagery, the motorcycles, and the motorcyclists--gay male icons of sexual power--the through-the-looking-glass disappearing tricks, and the wonderfully menacing Rolls-Royce sedan, lift it partially out of the soup.

As a strong poet, Rich transforms what she uses. She is interested only in the figure of the Death of Orpheus as a woman with a serious, disciplined and responsible view of power. She discards the romance and the traditional sentimentalized Eurydice.

I am walking rapidly through striations of light and dark thrown under an arcade.

I am a woman in the prime of life with certain powers,

and those powers severely limited

by authorities whose faces I rarely see.

I am a woman in the prime of life

driving her dead poet in a black Rolls-Royce

through a landscape of twilight and thorns.

A woman with a certain mission

which if obeyed to the letter will leave her intact.

A woman with the nerves of a panther

a woman with contacts among Hell's Angels

a woman feeling the fullness of her powers

at the precise moment when she must not use them

a woman sworn to lucidity

who sees through the mayhem, the smoky fires

of those underground streets

her dead poet learning to walk backward against the wind

on the wrong side of the mirror.

I mention this poem in this discussion because, even more than in poems by women about Orpheus, Eurydice is extraordinarily conspicuous by her absence. She is replaced by Death as the true love of Orpheus, but the concern is not with Orpheus whose film movement is reversed in the poem (he moves forward against the wind in the film), and whose existence on "the wrong side of the mirror" puts him--wrong--in her realm. He is even more diminished in the poem than he is in the film. He is merely "her dead poet" here. Nor is her interest truly in deepening or altering our understanding of death. The poem is a meditation on the woman in the film, free of the film romance and free of the old myth, at a time when Rich is concerned with forces that are violent and destructive, the political and sexual struggles of the sixties--the anti-war movement and the many-sided sexual revolution. The title of the book, The Will to Change, reminds us how much the strength of this woman is crucial to Rich. Within the book we see the dead poet become her dead husband, and the poet become "a student of weapon systems." The emphasis on strength, lucidity, survival, limit, mission and restraint must be seen in this context. It is clear that the traditional Eurydice will not serve as a flag to march behind in this war. Her displacement is a criticism of myth, and yet in keeping with the transformations of Eurydice by other poets, and the creation of a new myth.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis' Eurydice (1973-74) begins with Rilke's image of a closed flower, but it is simply an image of closure here:

Since the narcissus bud,

eye of a bird,

of a girl,

almond shaped eye,

when not yet open

smells more of its

rich flower

than

when it has opened

she desires never to be open.

This is followed by two images of ecstatic communion--the naked body joining sea and land, and oral sex sweeter than honey. Before death, Eurydice is aware that she is Orpheus'

creature:

Songs are his,

melody like a great linked chain.

Touch is his,

outlining the edge of my dance.

I cannot find my center

I cannot find my path.

Now he can make me open, shut and open

Now I have lost myself.

Her death is her desire "to pierce herself," to become a person on her own, and the underworld is where this can happen. When Orpheus arrives, she refuses him:

He wants to bring me back to the light

He wants me to retrace the steps of my journey.

No.

I am turning.

I am going deeper

into the living cave

...

In the cave

I am matted, woven roots.

...

She will take shape and sprout

...

She will brood and be born

girl of her own mother

mother of the labyrinth

daughter

pushing the child herself outward

This Eurydice holds on to the underworld to give birth to herself, a metaphor from therapeutic feminism. DuPlessis does not rewrite the Classical version of the story, but as we can see from the imagery of woven roots and pregnancy and birth, extends Rilke's vision of Eurydice by giving her a self-affirming reason for choosing the underworld.

Much truer to the Classical locus of the myth is Linda Gregg's Eurydice, from Too Bright to See, 1981. Her Eurydice grieves for both of her deaths and the inadequacy and failure of Orpheus, who is pictured as we see him in Rilke's poem--boyish, caught up with poetry and with himself. Gregg's vision of him is much more intimate than Rilke's. It is from Eurydice's point of view, after all; his wife whom he could not and (worse) would not save. Eurydice is here recast as a character in the domestic horror-show of the failed relationship where the revelation of pain and need has the clear-eyed calm of post-traumatic resignation. Anger at the childish man has been diffused into a pained, calm foreknowledge of failure, having read him accurately.

I linger, knowing you are eager (having seen

the strange world where I live)

to return to your friends

wearing the bells and singing the songs

which are my mourning.

With the water in them, with their strange rhythms.

I know you will not take me back.

Will take me almost to the world,

but not out to house, color, leaves.

Not to the sacred world that is so easy

for you my love.

Inside my mind and in my body is a darkness

which I am equal to, but my heart is not.

Yesterday you read the Troubadour poets

in the bathroom doorway

while I painted my eyes for the journey.

While I took tiredness away from my face,

you read of that singer in a garden

with the woman he swore to love forever.

You were always curious what love is like.

Wanted to meet me, not bring me home.

Now you whistle, putting together

the new words, learning the songs

to tell the others how far you travelled for me.

Singing of my desire to live.

Oh, if you knew what you do not know

I could be in the world remembering this.

I did not cry as much in the darkness

as I will when we part in the dimness

near the opening which is the way in for you

and was the way out for me, my love.

It is her lucidity (to use Rich's word) that saves this Eurydice from being a passive victim. She has the privileged insight of the lover into the beloved--not that of the oppressed into the oppressor: it is shallowness and self-absorption, more than callous power, that we see in this Orpheus. Gregg uses the myth to comment on daily life and not the reverse. Her aim is not to reinterpret the myth but to use it to diagnose emotional failure, and not elevate it into a reiteration of a divine pattern. Poetry, the Troubadour poet singing of "the woman he swore to love forever," is more real to this Orpheus than his own life--and by implication the Troubadour poet was as blind himself. Like Rilke's poem, it is a reminder that poetry is not an instrument of salvation.

The first two of Margaret Atwood's trio of poems, Orpheus (1), Eurydice, and Orpheus (2), concern Eurydice. The second Orpheus poem celebrates the courage and defiance of the poet, with Atwood's customary violence and triumph:

They have cut off both his hands

and soon they will tear

his head from his body in one burst

of furious refusal.

He foresees this. Yet he will go on

singing, and in praise.

To sing is either praise

or defiance. Praise is defiance.

These lines suggest a political sub-text behind this praise--nothing less defiant than opposition to totalitarianism, torture and support of the voiceless oppressed. It slathers the vision of the poet who has seen hell and who is "trying to sing/ love into existence again/ and he has failed" with resonant slogans that restrict song to the functions of political anthems, praise and defiance. We are on different territory, however, in Orpheus (1), which contains the familiar accusation about Orpheus's self-absorption, where the poem's sexual politics are defined by simple stereotyped roles. Eurydice addresses the poem to Orpheus and she complains that she is betrayed by the usual male power and female submission: "You had your old leash/ with you, love you might call it/ and your flesh voice." The failure to retrieve the eager Eurydice from Hell is due to Orpheus' typical blind, male egotism and failure of moral imagination: "You could not believe I was more than your echo."

The poem Eurydice is addressed to her, not spoken by her, during the doomed voyage to the upper world. The poem is an adumbration of Rilke's description of Eurydice: its central notion is that "You would have rather gone on feeling nothing." There is a suggestion that she is identified with Persephone: "You hold love in your hand, a red seed/ you had forgotten you were holding." But this goes nowhere. She has none of Persephone's power. In fact, the ghost gets her consciousness raised with an old slogan by the omniscient speaker at the conclusion of the poem:

Go back, you whisper,

but he wants to be fed again

by you. O handful of gauze, little

bandage, handful of cold

air, it is not through him

you will get your freedom.

These two poems adapt Eurydice as passive victim to the simple political myth into which she fits most easily. The tribute to Orpheus in the last poem in this sequence proceeds from different political stereotypes.

Ellen Bryant Voigt has two poems dealing with Eurydice. Like Atwood's poems, they are very different from one another, in fact opposed perspectives. The first, Eurydice, is from Forces of Plenty, 1983, and the second, Song and Story, is from Two Trees, 1993. Voigt's first Eurydice speaks with greater bitterness about hell than any of the examples we have looked at.

It bears no correlation

to the living world. It is

as if a malice toward all things

malleable, mutable,

had seized the universe

and emptied its spherical alleys.

This is a vision of absolute death, the end of motion and

change--stillness and emptiness. In this poem Eurydice is the complete victim. She continues in this mode for some lines:

How could you think it,

that I would choose to stay, or break

under the journey back? Like a dog

I had followed your unraveling

skein of sound--

Orpheus,

standing

between me and the iridescent earth,

you turned to verify the hell

I was thrown to and got

what you needed for your songs.

They do not penetrate the grave,

I cannot hear them, I cannot know

how much you mourn.

This figure is again familiar, Orpheus the self-absorbed artist for whom the suffering of Eurydice is merely a poetic subject. But the conclusion of the poem is a delayed and unexpected explosion--and its real point, for which Eurydice is only the pretext:

But I mourn:

against my will

I forgive you over and over,

transfixed by your face

emerging like a moon across your shoulder,

your shocked mouth calling "Wife, wife"

as you let me go.

In this vision the classical underworld becomes a bitterly ironic, post-Christian hell, where the heavenly virtue of forgiveness is perpetual, involuntary and the cruelest instrument of torture. This is hell with husband and wife locked into postures of abandonment and forgiveness for the purpose of mutual torment with her detached intelligence writhing at its excruciating understanding of her own inescapable emotions.

Voigt's second poem, Song and Story, is a paean to the singer, and reverts to Orpheus as the center of interest, as a mother singing to a comatose child and singing to galley slaves: "The one who can sing sings to the one who can't,/ who waits in the pit..." Singing brings life, and we are shown a very different Eurydice from the earlier poem in a very different hell:

Pain has no music,

pain is a story: it starts,

Eurydice was taken from the fields.

She did not sing--you cannot sing in hell--

but in that vicious dark she heard the song

flung like a rope into the crater of hell...

Laurie Sheck's Eurydice hungers for the affirmations provided so abundantly by Edith Sitwell but knows that they can not proceed so easily from the soul-beyond-suffering. Her Eurydice longs for the world whose fragility and capacity for pain she remembers vividly: "I thought it strange how so much that is fragile/ survives on earth, the earth with its power to maim." Cast down again to her second death, she moves with imagery that is reminiscent of Emily Dickinson in its understatement (not Sheck's usual mode):

She knew she would sleep soon, she knew

how it had gone before.

Yet even as she lay there (the trees bowing down

into the blackness, the slow freezing of her legs and arms)

she still felt the world waiting. She opened her hands.

As opposed to the poignancy, emotional directness and the ironic innocence of this affirmation, Michelle Boisseau's Eurydice, from No Private Life, deals with her largely with sexual metaphors that manage to sound as if they were entirely and earnestly about other matters:

you can tell

he's coming, feelingly along the slick walls

you'll have time

to fill your lungs before going down.

The effect of Orpheus' song is presented as sexual violence:

It wasn't the songs he sang to you,

but the singing: his voice ripped

the air open, a gold knife in a red melon.

Eurydice's relation to Orpheus is negotiated in the terms of the erotic calculus, which is the real subject of the poem--a debate about how much suffering the erotic is worth. It is a limited use of the myth, in which Eurydice's death is barely present. The poem occurs in the tortured, narrow world of troubled courtship.

Jody Gladding, in Stone Crop, also sees Eurydice as a figure of suffering, whose death is not really central to the handling of the myth. Neither figures are simple victims of men. She pictures Eurydice in the hell of a Bronx shooting gallery with collapsed veins: "she's so damn cold and can't get warm." Orpheus, the tour guide, cavalier in the company of the lost, will sing you "the song/ the one he sang to set that woman free." She is clearly not free. Gladding presents a ghastly vision of blindness in which the myth serves as a rhetorical setting for horror.

Jorie Graham's Self Portrait as both Parties and Orpheus and Eurydice use a high-handed play with the categories of relationship that define mortality, morality and a complex, many-sided emotional connection that does not easily invite being called "love." The first of these poems, the Self Portrait, employs fragmentary inner reveries of Orpheus and Eurydice concerning her drowning and dissolving--the imagery is vague, gentle, silky. Graham's Eurydice, like Rilke's, wants to return to the underworld: "dizzy with wanting to sink back in,/ thinning terribly in the holy separateness..." She is too impalpable to be grasped, an "hourglass-shaped cloud of silt," reminiscent of Virgil's "smoke upon gentle breezes that disappeared from his eyes at once in every direction" (Palaima translation).

The second poem moves back into the more familiar mythological territory, and yet it is transformed and made inward. This Orpheus does not want to possess and control, because love means possession by time and death:

this field with minutes in it

called woman, its presence in him the thing called

future--could not be married to it any more, expanse tugging his mind out into it,

tugging the wanting-to-finish out.

The speaker's voice moves in and out of his mind and language with an ominous playfulness:

Up ahead, I know, he felt it stirring in himself already, the glance,

the darting thing in the pile of rocks,

already in him there shining in the rubble, hissing. Did you want to remain completely unharmed?-

the point of view darting in him, shiny head in the ash-heap,

hissing Once upon a time, and then, Turn now darling give me that look,

that perfect shot, give me the place where I'm erased...

This bitter reversal of Browning's look conflates Orpheus'

glance with the snake of the Greek legend that kills Eurydice the first time, and with the sophisticated, Miltonic snake in Paradise taunting Eve with the necessity of harm as the cost of knowledge. These voices, with the banter of Orpheus, interweave and do not consolidate into distinct selves, even when they are named. (This is the strategy of the book, not just this poem.) Graham's interest is in the nuanced and suggestive inner voice as it reveals a myriad-minded vision, not in character or drama. The modes of male dominance are more sophisticated than Atwood's because the voices do not emerge from dramatic confrontations, let alone the confrontation of stereotypes, so we see Eurydice, for example, dealing with the dominating male gaze that confers a spurious unreality--not Orpheus "himself":

What she dreamed as she watched him turning with the bend in the road (can you

understand this?)-what she dreamed

was of disappearing into the seen

not of disappearing, lord, into the real--

Graham concludes the poem with a swirling consciousness that reminds us of how unanchored it is, letting us know with the famous blank spaces that crucial terms for the whole process absent themselves with our incomplete vision. This in turn insists that the act of knowing is that of the mind itself--even of the mind of the reader, who, like Eurydice, is flooded with possible visions--of the snake-man, even of

giving herself to it, looking back into the eyes

feeling the dry soft grass beneath her feet for the first time now in the mind

looking into that which sets the----- in motion and seeing there

a doorway open nothing on either side

(a slight wind now around them, three notes from up the hill)

through which morning creeps and the first true notes--

For they were deep in the earth and what is possible swiftly took hold.

Eurydice is not borrowed for the poem, she and Orpheus are stolen and refashioned as aspects of the complex consciousness that Graham explores.

Following H.D., Sherod Santos, in The City of Women, pictures Eurydice as the angry accuser of Orpheus. In his poem an assaulted woman delivered to the street by the Metro escalator collapses to the sidewalk. The male figure in the poem

Has backed away ferociously, his face drawn up

In a shocked, involuntary, rancorous frown

As if he himself had personally taken great offense

...as if Eurydice roused

By an ancient rage had finally risen to face the man

Who had one day driven her underground.

This Eurydice is an emblem of male guilt confronted by its fear of its own cruelty and terrified by the moral revenge of the perfect victim:

the sudden half-insane

Suspicion she'd done this to get at him.

But this need not be Eurydice, nor the man Orpheus. It could be any woman-victim or any man ridden by guilt.

Norman Dubie's vision of Eurydice in At the Opening to the Underground Cemetery at Colchis from Groom Falconer carries the dedication "after Rilke," which is unusual in that it is the only one of the poems we've looked at to do so, despite the fact that the influence of Rilke's poem has been pervasive. Orpheus and Hermes in Dubie's poem are recognizable from Rilke, though they are presented as dream figures, and lack the deep interiority that Rilke gives them, but his Eurydice is very different. She switches from a heavy-shouldered figure trailing grave linen

into the beast of sorrows--

Neck broken, her cropped head like a pendulous third breast,

She shuffles back into the yellow forest.

Instead of dwelling on this horror image of her suffering (is this from Goya or contemporary war photography?) Dubie switches the ground of the poem rapidly, with a laconic high-handed solicitousness to help the reader understand the divine pattern as a projection of her revenge:

It helps, at this point, to picture the maenads

Making mincemeat of Orpheus.

But he's done mourning. And there will be first,

An eternity of music, vision and orgies.

With this shift of direction, Dubie follows the general twentieth century movement of Eurydice from a figure of sorrow and suffering to anger and defiance.

In Greg Orr's recently completed Orpheus and Eurydice: a sequence of poems, we have come very far in another direction from the Classical vision of Eurydice as a victim. Orr views her with an uncomfortable distance--she is glad to be dead, and welcomes freedom from the messy, changeable world of the body. She says of her death;

Haven't I now unwound

the long bandage of my skin

and stepped out.

...

When I put on flesh again

it felt like a soiled dress.

What I saw, over his shoulder:

wind gnawing a bone sky.

My only longing then: to be

incorporeal, like the clouds:

shadows free of their bodies,

wings with nothing to lift.

Finally she sounds like the American Grandma in calico:

I come at all,

I'll come as lilacs

on a dark morning:

fragrant torches lifted

above the heart-shaped leaves.

Rilke's Eurydice is filled with death. This one never liked life. Persephone is more interesting to Orr. She rejects the purity that Eurydice longs for:

What's pure is monstrous:

the knife that leaves no scar.

Her vitality is closer than his Eurydice to the varied line that we have seen extend from H.D.'s poem. And in all of the poems we have discussed, we see Eurydice and Orpheus mirror a complex debate of wanting and not-wanting, enchantment and failure, defeat and triumph, that reflect the enormous change in the status of women and women artists. Whether she is a figure of defiant autonomy, artistic independence, acquiescence to cosmic order or a woman whose clear sight penetrates the deluding consciousness of her relation to male artists, Eurydice has needed to be fully reimagined from the pathetic figure of the passive, trapped woman. Where she goes next will no doubt depend on how the culture redefines the role of women.

WORKS CITED IN THIS ESSAY

Atwood, Margaret, Selected Poems II, Houghton Mifflin, 1987

Browning, Robert, Poetical Works 1833-1864, Oxford, 1970

Doolittle, Hilda, H.D.: Selected Poems, New Directions, 1982

Dubie, Norman, Groom Falconer, Norton, 1989

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, H.D.: The Career of that Struggle, Indiana UP, 1986

------, in Signets:Reading H.D., Wisconsin, 1990

------, Wells, Montemora, 1980 (The poem is dated 1973-74)

Gladding, Jody, Stone Crop, Yale, 1993

Gregg, Linda, Too Bright to See, Graywolf,1981

Graham, Jorie, The End of Beauty, Ecco, 1987

Orr, Greg, Orpheus and Eurydice: a sequence of poems, unpublished manuscript

Palaima, Tom, letter of 27 Feb 94

Rich, Adrienne, Poems Selected and New 1950-1974, Norton, 1975

Rilke, Rainer Maria, Selected Poems, (Tr. Stephen Mitchell), Random House, 1982

Santos, Sherod, The City of Women, Norton, 1993

Segal, Charles, Orpheus, The Myth of the Poet, Hopkins, 1989

Sheck, Laurie, Io at Night, Knopf, 1990

Sitwell, Edith, Collected Poems, Vanguard, 1954

Voigt, Ellen Bryant, The Forces of Plenty, Norton, 1983

------, Two Trees, Norton, 1993

Warden, John, Orpheus: The Metamorphosis of Myth, Toronto, 1982