"Myth" is a poem by American author Natasha Trethewey that uses an unusual structure to retell the story of Orpheus. Originally published in 2006, the poem appeared as part of her collection Native Guard, which received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1966. She received her undergraduate education at the University of Georgia, as well as advanced degrees in English and Creative writing from Hollins University and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of five collections of poetry: Domestic Work (2000), Bellocq's Ophelia (2002), Native Guard (2006), Thrall (2012), and Monument (2018). From 2012 to 2014, she served as the nineteenth U.S. Poet Laureate. Trethewey often writes about race and discrimination in varying historical contexts, recounting her own childhood in a mixed-race family or describing the lives of Black soldiers serving in the Civil War. In this particular poem, she deals with an emotional reexamination of a popular myth, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice.
In the original story, Orpheus journeyed to the underworld to save his beloved. After impressing Hades and Persephone with a song, he is allowed to take Eurydice back with him. However, Hades stipulates that he can only do so if he never looks at her as they journey out of the underworld. Distrustful of Hades, Orpheus fails to stop himself from turning around, and thus loses Eurydice forever. Trethewey's version begins with Orpheus remembering Eurydice's death in a dream-like state. He then describes how he continually remembers losing her in the darkness of the underworld. He says that he attempts to bring her back into the morning, but fails each time. In the second half, the poem is told backward, with each line being repeated in reverse. This structure allows Trethewey to capture the cyclical nature of Orpheus's regret, and his haunting feelings of loss. Here, repetition works concretely alongside the poem's themes, as it shows a protagonist unable to escape his past mistakes.
