Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

The poem "Myth" by Natasha Trethewey captures the fragile boundary between the dream world and waking life, especially as it pertains to the experience of loss. The poem exists in a cycle of grief, a never-ending loop that mirrors the speaker's emotional turbulence. It opens with the haunting line, "I was asleep while you were dying," immediately setting the stage for a confrontation with guilt and the limitations of human agency.

The line "It's as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow" creates an image of someone dying almost surreptitiously, moving away from the living world and into some other realm-a "rift" or "hollow" that we can neither see nor fully understand. This rift is complicated by the speaker's sleep, described as a gap "I make between my slumber and my waking," signifying an ambivalence towards coming to terms with the reality of loss. The use of the term "Erebus," referring to a place of darkness between Earth and Hades in Greek mythology, adds to this mysterious, interstitial space where the speaker tries to keep the lost one.

The poem's structure embodies its themes. It begins and ends with the same line, "I was asleep while you were dying," enacting the cyclical nature of grief. The repetition of lines across the stanzas indicates the repetitive, almost ritualistic quality of mourning; the longing, the waking, the turning are all actions replayed in the theater of the speaker's mind. "Again and again, this constant forsaking," the line recurs, capturing the relentless cycle of waking up to a reality where the loved one is absent.

The lines "But in dreams you live. So I try taking / you back into morning" touch on a crucial aspect of the grieving process: the illusion of control. In dreams, one can manipulate reality, negotiate with it, and create a refuge from the harsh truth of the physical world. Yet, the poem affirms that dreams are not an escape but a temporary salve. Despite the attempt to bring the lost one "back into morning," the speaker wakes to find that "you do not follow." The loved one remains in that liminal space-neither fully present nor fully gone, sustained only in the "Erebus" of the speaker's emotional landscape.

In a mere eighteen lines, Trethewey delves into the intricacies of loss, guilt, and the relentless cycle of grief. She masterfully uses the poem's form to mimic the cyclical, repetitive nature of grieving, where waking up is both a daily rebirth and a daily death-another day to remember, another day the loved one is not here. The poem leaves us not with a sense of closure but with a haunting resonance, much like a myth that is retold across generations, its core truths reverberating with each new telling.

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