Ceres and Persephone in 'The Pomegranate' and 'The Bistro Styx' Anonymous 12th Grade

As time passes, plants grow, people age and eventually the ones who hold most dear will leave your side. In the myth of Ceres and Persephone, the God of Harvest loses her matured daughter to the King of the Underworld. The tale continues on to display the search for the prolonged search for her dear daughter and the emotional turmoil that ensues from this abrupt situation. “The Pomegranate” and “The Bistro Styx” illustrate the complex mother-daughter relationship between a modern day Ceres and Persephone; while both poems depict the struggle of a mother accepting a daughter’s coming of age, Boland shows a mother’s eventual acceptance of this while Dove conveys a mother’s denial and fight against it.

Both works efficiently showcase the similar internal battle the mother, the narrator, and Ceres silently face when realizing her daughter is ready to leave and move on in her life. Both narrators seem to be in denial. In “The Pomegranate”, the speaker “walked out in a summer twilight searching for [her] daughter at bed-time. [She] carried her back past whitebeams and wasps and honey-scented buddleias” (Boland 13-18) creating a sense of tranquility, almost as if her daughter was never taken away by Hades. It is later revealed that...