Summary
The poem begins with Orpheus remembering the loss of Eurydice. He describes how she lives on in his dreams, but disappears in the morning, dying again every day. He feels trapped in the moment he failed her.
Analysis
"Myth" is a retelling of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. In the original myth, Orpheus traveled to the underworld to rescue his lover Eurydice from death. Hades told him he could take her back, but only if he didn't turn around to look at her when they walked back up to the regular world. At the last second, Orpheus turned and lost Eurydice forever. The poem captures the state he finds himself in as he endlessly remembers her demise and his inability to save her.
The poem opens with its central scene: "I was asleep while you were dying." Orpheus is recalling the instance in which he lost Eurydice. He depicts his feelings of loss, as he remembers her "slipping" away from him: "It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow / I make between my slumber and my waking." The words "rift" and "hollow" emphasize the liminal, transitional quality of this space he describes. The entire poem is centered around the in-between aspect of where he loses Eurydice in his mind. He is haunted by this memory, and continually revisits it each night.
He writes in greater depth about this regret in the next stanza: "the Erebus I keep you in, still trying / not to let go." The "Erebus" he refers to is the Greek concept of darkness, but more specifically he means that he is holding her in the darkness of his memories in an attempt to save some part of her. However, as he notes later, this is a hopeless task: "You’ll be dead again tomorrow, / but in dreams you live." The only place he can still be with her is in dreams, so each time he wakes up in the morning she is "dead again." Still, he tries to take it one step further: "So I try taking / you back into morning. Sleep-heavy, turning, / my eyes open, I find you do not follow." This is a poignant image, in that it shows him being unable to save her, but also recalls the original myth to which the poem refers. The phrase "I find you do not follow" solidifies a parallel between the moment Orpheus wakes up each day and the moment he turned to Eurydice in the underworld, as both show him discovering that she is gone. He is making the same terrible discovery again, each time he wakes up. The section ends with the line "Again and again, this constant forsaking," effectively summarizing the way Orpheus is caught in a cycle of misery, underscoring the repetitive nature of these moments which occur each morning and night.
The poem then replays in reverse. After an asterisk in between the two halves, each line from the previous three stanzas is restated in the opposite order. The changed placement of these lines shifts importance to Orpheus's efforts to preserve Eurydice. This is particularly true in the first and second stanzas: "Again and again, this constant forsaking: my eyes open, I find you do not follow," and "But in dreams you live. So I try taking, / not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow." Where the first half begins with him in a dream state, unsure of what is real, here he is concretely aware of his loss. This is particularly emphasized in the phrase "my eyes open," as it shows him being definitively awake. But it ends on the same note of defeat and tragedy, repeating the first line at the very end: "I was asleep while you were dying." The poem is written with an ABAABA rhyme scheme. This allows Trethewey to keep some degree of stylistic continuity between the two halves of the piece, as the rhyme remains the same in both directions. The effect of this mirrored structure is to show how he constantly resides in these dreams of her, unable to let go or move on. The circularity of the poem highlights the inevitability of its conclusion. Each day, Orpheus arrives at the same end, losing Eurydice. Trethewey uses this formal structure to capture the emotional content of this mythic story.
