Mother Love

By: Guillory, Daniel L., McCann, Janet, Magills Survey of American

Literature, Revised Edition,

Published during Rita Doves tenure as poet laureate, Mother Love shows her grace and skill as a poet.
The title announces the subject clearly, but the poems have a range of emotion and observation that
surprises the reader continually. The figures behind the poems are Persephone and Demeter, a daughter
and mother who learn to be together and apart. Real places and other mothers and daughters blend
with the mythic. Stylistically, the poems have a range, but most of them are sonnets not traditional
sonnets, but sonnets nevertheless and the concluding section is a crown of sonnets associating
Demeter and Persephone with a womans relationship with the earth that mirrors her, and with the
whole mother-daughter cycle of love and loss. The poet herself slips into the cycle too, as another face
of woman. Dove comments in her introduction that The Demeter/Persephone cycle of betrayal and
regeneration is ideally suited for this [sonnet] form since all three mother-goddess, daughter-consort,
and poet are struggling to sing in their chains.

HEROES

A flower in a weedy field:

make it a poppy. You pick it.
Because it begins to wilt
you run to the nearest house
to ask for a jar of water.
The woman on the porch starts
screaming: you've plucked the last poppy
in her miserable garden, the one
that gave her the strength every morning
to rise! It's too late for apologies
though you go through the motions, offering
trinkets and a juicy spot in the written history
she wouldn't live to read, anyway.
So you strike her, she hits
her head on a white boulder
and there's nothing to be done
but break the stone into gravel
to prop up the flower in the stolen jar
you have to take along
because you're a fugitive now
and you can't leave clues.

Already the story's starting to unravel,

the villagers stirring as your heart
pounds into your throat. Why
did you pick that idiot flower?
Because it was the last one
and you knew
it was going to die.

Heroes, although not a sonnet, is a nightmarish representation of a womans mixed feelings of

desperation, responsibility, and guilt. It reads, in fact, like a bad dream the person addressed as you
picks a poppy in the field and asks at a nearby house for a jar of water to preserve it, but the woman of
the house starts/ screaming: youve picked the last poppy/ in her miserable garden . . . The main
character addressed as you starts apologizing, then hits the woman, who falls and strikes her head.
The thief has to flee, terrified and ashamed, with the stolen flower. Oh why/ did you pick that idiot
flower? The poem concludes. Because it was the last one/ and you knew/ it was going to die.
The subjects of the book converge in this dreamlike parable: Persephone is picking flowers when
abducted, the poet is in some ways a thief, and a womans life of mothering and being mothered is
fraught with the kind of anxiety that this poem evokes -terror of harming instead of nurturing, of
being blamed for destruction when the intent was to preserve. The poem suggests that a woman cannot
avoid her fate as a woman, which is to be nurturer and destroyer.
The power in these poems is in the blend of reality and myth; the sonnet Missing is a prime example.
The speaker is a daughter who is missing and has various identities: Persephone and any missing
daughter (and broadly, any daughter) who at some point in her life is missing to her mother. She
comments that nothing marked my last/ known whereabouts, not a single glistening petal. She is
returned and watches her mothers reception of her explanations: It seems almost as though the
speaker is mother and daughter at once, the missing and the one who misses. The poem pulls subtle
strings in its analysis of the mother-daughter relationship.

PERSEPHONE ABDUCTED

She cried out for Mama, who did not

hear. She left with a wild eye thrown back,
she left with curses, rage
that withered her features to a hag's.
No one can tell a mother how to act:
there are no laws when laws are broken, no names to call upon. Some say there's nourishment for
pain.

and call it Philosophy.

That's for the birds, vultures and hawk,
the large ones who praise
the miracle of flight because
they use it so diligently.
She left us singing in the field, oblivious
to all but the ache of our own bent backs.
Lamentations
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 answer
is to deny this world, descend rung
by rung into no loss and no desire.
Listen: empty yet full, silken
air and brute tongue,
they are saying:
To refuse to be born is one thing -but once you are here,
you'd do well to stop crying
and suck the good milk in.
Persephone, Falling
One narcissus among the ordinary beautiful
flowers, one unlike all the others! She pulled,
stooped to pull harder -when, sprung out of the earth
on his glittering terrible
carriage, he claimed his due.
It is finished. No one heard her.
No one! She had strayed from the herd.
(Remember: go straight to school.
This is important, stop fooling around!
Don't answer to strangers. Stick
with your playmates. Keep your eyes down.)
This is how easily the pit
opens. This is how one foot sinks into the ground.
Golden Oldie
I made it home early, only to get

stalled in the driveway, swaying

at the wheel like a blind pianist caught in a tune
meant for more than two hands playing.
The words were easy, crooned
by a young girl dying to feel alive, to discover
a pain majestic enough
to live by. I turned the air-conditioning off,
leaned back to float on a film of sweat,
and listened to her sentiment:
Baby, where did our love go?
--a lament
I greedily took in
without a clue who my lover
might be, or where to start looking.

Persephone Abducted is also a sonnet, this time describing the abduction of the daughter
from an ambiguous point of view, the we who may represent the point of view of those left.
The poem explores the grief of the mother who cannot fathom her loss. The standard answers
for grief do not apply in real cases: Some say theres nourishment for pain,/ and call it
Philosophy. However, that is for the birds, who are, in fact, the birds of prey hawk and
vulture. There is no answer to loss except endurance and acceptance of fate.
The loss of Persephone and Demeters rage and grief blur with other stories of mothers and
daughters, evoking all daughters departures, whether voluntary or involuntary, temporary or
permanent. Reading the collection is painful because mother-love is so intermingled with
mother-loss whether it is the child or the mother who is removed that its brief patches of
sunlight and joy seem few. Statistic: The Witness seems to blend Persephones story with that
of a young woman abducted. The speaker begins No matter where I turn, she is there/
screaming. The speaker tries various means of forgetting, but cannot the tiniest details of
the abduction obsess her and will not pass from her mind. The speaker cannot forget, and so
she turns to the earth the ultimate mother whose green oblivion will finally obliterate
what she has seen. As in other poems, the contemporary is superimposed on the mythic
mother and Mother Earth, the abducted child with Persephone in order to provide an
emotional impression of the terrible fragility of motherhood.
The combination of mythic and ordinary is clearest perhaps in The Bistro Styx, a clever poem
in five eccentrically rhyming sonnets which details a luncheon meeting between a mother, the
speaker, and her blighted child, who has given up her own life to be a muse to her lover, an

artist. The daughter gives details of her life in what her mother sees as Hades and misses her
mothers intimate question about her happiness because she is biting into the starry rose of a
fig her version of the fatal pomegranate that Persephone tasted, binding her to Pluto for
the winter months. This daughter has clearly made her choice; all her mother can do is resign
herself. The poem is highly specific and evocative in its description of restaurant and
conversation it takes the title to remind the reader of the mythic grounding.
Doves poems in this collection are more open and allusive than in some others and sometimes
defy explication, but they communicate with extraordinary clarity to the intuition. The use of the
sonnet form is both appropriate and teasing. The poems foreground Doves lifelong theme of
womans experience as mother and daughter. Some of the poems by their evocative detail
reflect her commitment to African American issues, but for the most part the themes of Mother
Love are universal.

FROM PRESEPHONE IN HELL VI

After the wind, this air
imploded down my throat,
a hot, rank syrup swirled with smoke
from a hundred cigarettes.
Soft chatter roaring. French nothings.
I dont belong here.
She doesnt belong, thats certain.
Leather skirts slipped
a bit: sweet. No gloves? American,
because she wears black badly.
Id like to see her in chartreuse,
walking around like a living
after-dinner drink.
He inclines his head, rather massive,
like a cynical parrot. Almost a smile.
"Puis-je vous offrir mes servies?"
Sotto voice, his inquiry
curls down to lick my hand.
Standard nicety, probably,
but my French could not stand up
to meet it.
"Or myself, if you are looking."
I whisper this. Im sure she doesnt understand.
"Pardon me?"
"Excuse, I thought you were French.
You are looking for someone?"
"Yes. Im.sure hes here somewhere."
Here you are. "
I hope he wont let himself

be found too soon. A drink?"

Hes gone and back, as easily as smoke,
in each hand a slim glass
alive with a brilliant lime.
"What time is it?"
she blurts,
shrinking from the glass.
"A minuit. Midnight.
The zero hour,
you call it?"
Again the dark smile.
"Some call it that."
"Chartreuse," I say, holding out a glass,
"is a tint not to be found au naturel
in all of France, except in bottles
and certain days at the Cote dAzur
when sun performs on ocean what
we call un mirage, a--"
"trick of light." I take the glass,
lift it to meet his.
Persephone in Hell, a sequence of seven poems, forms the third of seven sections in Doves
collection Mother Love. The sequence and the collection explore the Greek myth of Demeter:
With almost no witnesses and with the permission of her father Zeus, the supreme Olympian
deity, Persephone has been abducted and raped by Hades, the ruler of the underworld and her
uncle, who subsequently makes her his queen. Unable to find her daughter, an angry and
inconsolable Demeter wanders among mortals, disguised as an elderly woman. She comes to
Eleusis, where she meets the four lovely daughters of Celeus, king of Eleusis, and his wife
Metaneira. Demeter, at Metaneiras urging, becomes nurse to the couples only son, the infant
Demophon. Determined to make the boy immortal, each night Demeter secretly places him in
the fire. One night Metaneira discovers this and screams in terror, thus thwarting Demeters
plans. An angry, radiant goddess reveals herself and disappears, but not before ordering the
people of Eleusis to build a temple and altar in her honor and promising to teach them rites
that became known as the Eleusinian Mysteries. Still inconsolable, Demeter lets the crops die
and refuses solace from the other Olympian gods and goddesses. Eventually Zeus agrees to
return Persephone, but because she has eaten pomegranate seeds offered by Hades, she must
spend fall and winter with her husband and spring and summer with her mother, thus ensuring
the seasons, agriculture, and partial consolations.
The focus of Persephone in Hell is the riveting episode with which the ancient account of the
myth, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, begins: the abduction and rape of Persephone by
Hades. Doves treatment of this episode is innovative and complex. The former U. S. poet
laureate (1993-1995) announces its complexity in the sections epigraph by American expatriate
poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle): Who can escape life, fever,/ the darkness of the abyss?/ lost, lost,

lost . . . In the sequences opening poem, radical innovations appear, including a modern
Persephone, a nineteen-year-old American Girdedwith youth and good tennis shoes. Her
first-person voice ushers the reader into the sequences setting: Hell is a bone-chilling October
in Paris, the City of Lights; the city, Persephone notes, of detritus and neon-lit underground
sewers; and the city of Our Lady (Notre Dame Cathedral) to whose heavy presence, like the
mental presence of her mother Demeter, Persephone keeps turning her back. In the fifth poem,
another innovation appears: Hades is a sardonic, older Frenchman, a habitual seducer whose
character borders on caricature.
The mood of the sequences first six poems combines ennui and irritation. Both underscore the
detachment with which Persephone thinks of her mother who with her frilly ideals//couldnt
know what [Persephone] was feeling;//I was doing everything and feeling nothing. Ennui
characterizes the way in which Persephone and Hades individually assess their surroundings
and people. Both are especially irritated by ineffectual artists and intellectuals, whom Hades
compares metaphorically to a noisy zoo; Persephone responds, let this party/ swing without
me. Within this dissatisfaction, Dove reconstructs their encounter.
The sequence is crafted as a three-stage rite of passage for Persephone: fledgling
initiatives/waiting, the contact, the life-defining initiation. In the first four poems, Persephone
experiments with sexual and social relationships, which remain superficial. She is curious but
detached, a young woman who knows only seven words of French, the language of Hell and
adulthood. The one who will teach Persephone that language appears in the fifth poem, a
monologue delivered by a bored Hades whose divertissement (Persephone, as it turns out)
will be a matter of chance: The next one through that gate,/ woman or boy, will get/ the fullcourt press of my ennui. The sixth poem captures Persephone and Hadess first meeting and
conversation. Both realize that Persephone does not belong there, but, as she inadvertently
points out, the Midnight./ The zero hour of their encounter has arrived. In the sequences
final poem, Dove alternates their voices as each approaches their pivotal sexual encounter.
Persephone, for example, recognizes that a part of her had been waiting, to which Hades
counters, I am waiting/ you are on your way.
Forms and Devices
The Persephone in Hell sequence is linked by theme rather than form. Dove gives each of the
seven poems a distinctive format, using the varied forms, lines, quotations, and typography for
crucial purposes. They identify multiple voices and personas that move in and out of the
poems. They also intensify a driving sense of order that moves below the seemingly random
surface of Persephones experiences and responses. The result is an intense unit. While none of
the seven poems of Persephone in Hell is in the sonnet form, the closely linked thematic unit
suggests that Dove may have had in mind a seven-poem form known as a crown of sonnets.
Whatever the case, Persephone in Hell ends with Persephone being claimed sexually as the
queen of the underworld.
Surprising appearances of formal language in the dominant informality of the sequence support
its unsettling effect. In addition, although Dove occasionally uses irregular end or internal

rhymes, most of the lines are unrhymed. This decision, as well as the poets mixtures of other
devices, emphasizes the poems nuanced informality. For example, Dove frequently sets up
terse catalogs of details. Just as often, she uses a consonant emphasis, such as s, to carry a
barrage of details and partial and irregular rhymes: Through the gutters, dry rivers/ of the
seasons detritus./ Wind soughing the plane trees./ I command my knees to ignore the season/
as I scuttle over stones. Similes, used sparingly but strategically, combine tension and details.
Typical examples include Persephones description of Pariss sewer system (like some
demented plumbers diagram/ of a sinners soul) and her initial impression of Hades (He
inclines his head, rather massive,/ like a cynical parrot.) A more important device is Doves
repetitions of images and emphases. To trace, for example, her use of Africans, way,
light/dark, Mother/Our Lady, food and drinks, and autumnal references is to study the poets
craft and the poems themes.
Themes and Meanings
The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, even in its disturbing account of Persephones rape, gives the
starring role to the goddess of agriculture. Dove expands Demeters role, adding psychological
layers to the goddess-mothers love and loss. The poet, however, also develops Persephones
and Hadess characters, giving them prominent first-person voices throughout the collection.
These revisions of the myth serve Doves thematic purposes. With this triad, the poet can
emphasize contradictions in and pressures on maternal love, mother-daughter relationships,
and adulthood.
One such contradiction, the narcissism of all three characters, is Doves covert psychological
gesture to the account in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter in which a narcissus flower attracts
first Persephone and then Hades to Persephone. Certainly, Demeters maternal pride matches
the self-absorption of both Persephone and Hades. The result is a triangle of willfulness,
uneasiness, and power struggles. Demeter, for example, will not accept her daughters sexuality
or autonomy. The goddess is also a chronic worrier. Persephone, even as she gains
independence and tries to shake off her mothers worry, is bored and numb. The latter problem
also characterizes Hades and the detachment with which Hades and Persephone approach each
other. In fact, all three characters in this sequence reflect numbed states of waiting: Its an old
drama, waiting./ One grows into it,/ enough to fill the boredom . . ./ its a treacherous fit.
Finding a way out of this treacherous, three-way fit is the goal of Doves account of the myth.
Dove allows Persephone to articulate that difficulty: For a moment I forgot which way to turn;
Which way is bluer?; and And if I refuse this being/ which way then? The quest is for light
and enlightenment, and, ironically, Persephone approaches it when she raises to Hades the
glass of chartreuse that he compares to un mirage, which she coyly translates as a trick of
light. As their sexual encounter begins, she reflects confusion in whispered questions to herself
(if I whispered to the moon,/ if I whispered to the olive/ which would hear me?), which are
patterned on the opening line of German poet Rainer Maria Rilkes 1923 Duineser Elegien
(Duino Elegies, 1930): Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?)

By invoking (in whispers, not screams) the virgin goddesses of the moon (Artemis) and the olive
(Athena) both with contradictory roles, both cruel when offended Persephone confirms
her divided mind. Still, in her charged last question who has lost me? she moves toward
an unexpected nexus where selfhood, sexuality, an adult relationship, and her mothers advice
(be still she whispers/ and light will enter) meet and where understanding can begin.
Persephone is on her way to becoming the perennial traveler-mediator between darkness and
light, fragmentation and harmony, and interior and exterior worlds. However, she must begin
with an interior journey. As Dove explained in a 1996 interview, I would like to remind people
that we have an interior lifeand without that interior life, we are shells, we are nothing. The
Persephone in Hell poems demonstrate Doves wise advice. The reader is pulled into a
modern interior of the Demeter myth, into its underworld of change, chance, sexuality, grief,
willfulness, violence, and love. It is only within the interior that poetry and myth reveal their
secret: The underworld teaches the reader the way back to the seasons of life, seasons
transformed by the journey.

The title poem Mother Love appears in the second of seven sections of Rita Doves collection
Mother Love. Like all the poems in the collection, Mother Love examines a dramatic story
from Greek mythology, the story of Demeter, goddess of grain and agriculture, and her
beautiful daughter Persephone. It is, in Doves words, a tale of a violated world,
simultaneously ancient and modern.
A summary of the myth is important for this poem. With almost no witnesses and with the
permission of her father Zeus, the supreme Olympian deity, Persephone has been abducted
and raped by Hades, the ruler of the underworld and her uncle, who subsequently makes her
his queen. Unable to find her daughter, an angry and inconsolable Demeter wanders among
mortals, disguised as an elderly woman. She comes to Eleusis, where she meets the four lovely
daughters of Celeus, king of Eleusis, and his wife Metaneira. Demeter, at Metaneiras urging,
becomes nurse to the couples only son, the infant Demophon. Determined to make the boy
immortal, each night Demeter secretly places him in the fire. One night Metaneira discovers
this and screams in terror, thus thwarting Demeters plans. An angry, radiant goddess reveals
herself and disappears, but not before ordering the people of Eleusis to build a temple and altar
in her honor and promising to teach them rites that became known as the Eleusinian Mysteries.
It is the episode of Demeter and the young son of Celeus and Metaneira that Dove addresses in
the poem Mother Love and that precedes the rest of the myth: Still inconsolable, Demeter
lets the crops die and refuses solace from the other Olympian gods and goddesses. Eventually
Zeus agrees to return Persephone, but because she has eaten pomegranate seeds offered by
Hades, she must spend fall and winter with her husband and spring and summer with her
mother, thus ensuring the seasons, agriculture, and partial consolations.

Demeters first-person voice dominates the poem, which is divided into two stanzas of twelve
and sixteen lines. These twenty-eight lines suggest a subtle doubling of the traditional fourteen
lines of a sonnet, a form that preoccupies Dove throughout the collection. The poem is, in fact,
a sort of double mothering and a double mourning. In the three sentences that make up the
first stanza, Demeter reflects on maternal instincts that combine deep comforts and fears.
Tracing in her mind the nurture and natural maturation of children, she voices parents
universal worries as their children rise, primed/ for Love or Glory and as their daughters
youthful myopia blinds them to advancing perils.
The poet then makes a shift between the two stanzas, moving from generalizations to specifics.
Demeter recalls this kind woman (Metaneira), her bouquet of daughters, and her young
son. Demeter will not stop those daughters from being scattered and taken in marriage, but she
decides to save the noisy and ordinary boy who, if cured to perfection, could become
immortal. This attempt is not simple. She wants to make Demophon invulnerable, but
Metaneiras terrified screams end all that and force Demeter to remember her own screams
and her vulnerable, lost daughter. She thus answers the rhetorical question with which she
begins the poem: Who can forget the attitude of mothering?
Forms and Devices
In drawing from mythology for this poems structure and themes, Dove joins a long line of
writers, artists, musicians, and choreographers. Her awareness of this shows throughout the
collection Mother Love in epigraphs taken from works by writers such as H. D. (Hilda Doolittle),
Muriel Rukeyser, James Hillman, Jamaica Kincaid, John Milton, Kadia Molodowsky, and even
Mother Goose. It shows more deeply in her combined preoccupation with mythology and the
sonnet form, a combination she acknowledges as an homage and counterpoint to Die
Sonette an Orpheus (1923; Sonnets to Orpheus, 1923) by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
Mother Love, like many of the collections poems, reflects no ordinary approach to traditional
sonnet forms with their set meters, rhyme schemes, and stanza lengths. Still, the sonnet form is
a stubborn and surprising presence in the poem. For example, unlike the final two rhyming lines
(a couplet) with which any Shakespearean or English sonnet ends, Dove begins Mother Love
with a couplet (rhyming mothering with bothering) that does not create a closure. The
second line of the couplet uses enjambment (no end-stop) to continue directly on to
subsequent lines and irregular end rhymes throughout the two stanzas. (The second stanza, for
instance, is filled with end and internal rhymes of er and ur syllables.) Furthermore, the
poet reverses and doubles the stanza patterns of a Petrarchan or Italian sonnet, which begins
with an eight-line stanza (an octet) and concludes with six lines (a sestet). Mother Love thus
begins with a twelve-line stanza and concludes with sixteen lines. These sonnet cues and
reversals are powerful. It is as if, like Demeters daughter, the revered sonnet forms have been
taken underground. Like Demeters response to Demophon, the absence of the primary form
heightens the readers awareness of that form and its replacement.
Despite such changes, Dove follows the thematic development scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet.
Mother Love begins with an exposition of the theme, then elaborates on that theme. The

poet then creates the traditional turn between the two stanzas by shifting to a specific example
of the theme before moving, in the final two lines, to the themes conclusion. The reader is
certainly more conscious of the poems voice and language than its nuanced structure. Dove
achieves this by giving Demeter highly accessible language and informal, conversational speech
rhythms; equally important, each of her six sentences is a natural breath unit. As a result, the
reader, drawn effortlessly into Demeters voice, focuses on the unfolding narrative and the
poets arresting images and diction.
Themes and Meanings
The title of the poem Mother Love announces its purpose: to explore Demeters fierce
maternal love and grief. In this exploration, particularly in the poems second stanza, Dove
closely follows one of the episodes included in the ancient Greek Homeric Hymn to Demeter.
However, the poets complicated treatment of Demeter opens up the larger subjects of the
collection Mother Love: the complex nature of maternal love and the even more complex
nature of relations between mothers and daughters.
The description of Doves portrayal of Demeter as complex is not based on the poems
horrifying simile: a baby sizzling on a spit/ as neat as a Virginia ham. It is important to
remember (as several critics have not) that the account of the Demeter-Demophon episode in
the Homeric Hymn to Demeter does not end with the baby being roasted alive but with an
angry Demeter promising that since she was not allowed to make him immortal, the child will,
at least, receive imperishable honor as a man. The knotty qualities of Doves Demeter surface
in the last three lines of stanza 1: Demeters pride in her maternal skills and her delight in
children give way to an intense denigration of adolescent maturation (girls with their immature
one-way mirrors of romance and boys as fledgling heroes) and sexuality (the smoky
battlefield). That the goddess-mother will not face either this natural cycle or Persephones
sexual awakening becomes clear in the change of subject in stanza 2. By this abrupt shift, the
poet underscores the extremity of Demeters repressive mental state. Her denial and
repression of memory are acted out without a single mention of her daughter: Since
Persephone was taken from her, she will take anothers child a son rather than a daughter
who might remind Demeter of her own; because Persephone was violated by the underworld
of death (Hades), she will make sure that this surrogate child is made impervious to death and
destruction.
In Demeters foiled substitution and in the searing understatement of her final sentence, the
poet accentuates the open-endedness of Demeters dilemma: To remember her daughter the
child and her daughter the vulnerable, sexual, autonomous adult is to be forced back into an
ambiguous, even ruthless circle of love and life. As the poem, young Demophon, and Demeter
demonstrate, this is a place that cannot be cured to perfection. Nevertheless, this is the
charged circle into which the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rita Dove places herself and this
collection; her dedication in Mother Love makes that clear from the start: FOR my mother TO
my daughter.