Many contemporary poets have repurposed ancient myths for their work. In "Myth," Trethewey joins these writers in updating an older story with a more contemporary vocabulary, using it as the basic foundation for her poem. Other examples of this type of work demonstrate how these narratives can be repurposed to speak to a different time and place.
In "A Myth of Devotion," American poet Louise Glück retells the myth of Hades and Persephone (two central players in the Orpheus story):
When Hades decided he loved this girl
he built for her a duplicate of earth,
everything the same, down to the meadow,
but with a bed added.Everything the same, including sunlight,
because it would be hard on a young girl
to go so quickly from bright light to utter darkness
In this story, Hades captures Persephone and brings her to the underworld. In Glück's poem, she imagines Hades reproducing everything in the world above, complete with meadows and sunlight. The poem paints Hades in a surprisingly tender light, showing him trying to provide Persephone with all of the comforts of her old life. This is striking in that it departs from the traditional characterization of Hades as brutal and cruel.
Similarly, in the poem, "Priapus, Keeper-of-Orchards," Imagist poet H.D. describes Priapus, the mythic keeper of orchards, farms, and gardens:
I saw the first pear
As it fell.
The honey-seeking, golden-banded,
The yellow swarm
Was not more fleet than I,
(Spare us from loveliness!)
And I fell prostrate,
Crying,
“Thou hast flayed us with thy blossoms;
Spare us the beauty
Of fruit-trees!”
H.D. uses vivid imagery to bring Priapus's story to fuller realization, allowing the reader to imagine each detail of a spring bounty. The speaker of the poem is humbly offering tribute to the god, overwhelmed by the beauty of this scene in front of him. The small scale of this story—centering around a single pear—gives more weight to the images, placing them in the context of gratitude on a spiritual level. These poets, like Trethewey, take these mythic narratives and add an extra layer of depth to them, in the form of emotional complexity and imagistic richness.
