Persephone the Wanderer

What will you do / when it is your turn in the field with the god?

I have been thinking about this Louise Glück poem. Like much of the collection and many Glück poems, “Persephone the Wanderer” charts a pulse of personal angst against a network of abstract consideration. In the end, the abstractions peel away and we are left with a white, hot sentiment. (To say this is what we are left with is not to say that this is all there is.) I’ll be charting that evolution in this reading. You can find the text here to follow along with.

The speaker flits between three approaches to the Persephone myth. As a recap, Persephone is the daughter of Demeter, the Greek goddess of the harvest. In the central myth of Persephone, Hades, god of the underworld / afterlife, abducts and rapes Persephone. Demeter, grieved by her daughter’s disappearance, abandons her duties and summer slips into winter. Persephone is eventually allowed to return to the surface; however, in the dream logic of a myth, because she has consumed the fruit of the underworld, she is only allowed to spend half a year on the surface and must return to the underworld for the other half. (Apparently the story I remembered in which) The poem moves between treating

1. the myth as a text and allegory,

2. the narrative reality of the myth (thinking of the story as if it were real),

3. and the speaker’s personal relationship to the myth.

The lines between these are uncertain, complicated. But we can say broadly that the piece moves through these modes in this order, albeit not exactly linearly.

We start immediately with the story as a text, and a text with variations. The narrative is conveyed obliquely, in passive voice, “Persephone / is taken.” The mother she is taken from is “the goddess of the earth.” You might be more familiar with Demeter as goddess of the harvest or as the goddess of summer, but she was treated more broadly and sometimes identified with Gaia as earth goddess.

Characterizing Demeter’s withdrawal as a “punishment” of the earth already veers away from expected discourse about the myth. We will not be getting a scholar’s disinterest in the tale, but an emotionally laden parsing over. Yet, to begin with, the poem gives an abstract gloss on Demeter’s withdrawal — that it is an expression of a general desire to do “harm, particularly / unconscious harm” — and a (pseudo-)theoretical labeling of this as “negative creation.”

I find myself caught between two reactions. In one, this characterization seems unfair, even smug. We’re rendering this unflattering judgment of Demeter and one that, being rendered in the language of general psychology and the unconscious, is hard to deny. (One thinks of Freud: if the Oedipus complex is a general condition of consciousness, there’s no room for the individual to except themselves.) And yet for all that the claim is hard to deny.

We never quite get settled in this poem; the lines between the myth as text and as events are continuously teased and stretched. In this way, questions of the text — what was Persephone’s response to the rape — bleed uncomfortably out of the page. The scholars are not simply studying the text: they are “pawing over” Persephone’s “sensations” (as if Persephone were a real person with her own subjectivity), engaging in the kind of questioning of the victim and their “innocence” that “happens so often now to modern girls.”

We can imagine here the poem veering off in a straightforward, political direction: a take down of rape culture, of patriarchy. But it doesn’t. We keep starting over on the text. As if the speaker were not themselves sure quite where they want to take their thoughts. These restarts are not however, random, there is a momentum a carry over between them.

What we have in both of these first two starts is a moral rupture. Demeter’s “punishment of the earth” has brought on at least the accusation of sadism; howsoever fair, we cannot simply think of her as the benevolent mother. With Persephone’s sensation of the rape we have opened up the thought, the palpably unfair thought, that her innocence has been compromised. Even if we despise the thought, something has changed, Persephone’s return is not a return to the way things were. (“Stained with red juice” is perfect here: of course we know that a juice stain is superficial, easily cleaned, and yet we perceive it the same way we would a blood stain.)

Perhaps this rupture more of a revealing than a change. At least, this is the direction the following series of questions leads us. The speaker starts by questioning their own characterization of the myth, for presupposing that the Earth, Demeter’s house, is her home. Indeed, that it has ever been her home. Or, further, that it has ever been her mother’s home. These are phrased as questions, but the progression carries the force of conviction.

I have been stuck on “hamstrung by ideas of causality.” The language throughout the piece is frequently abstract, academic at times, but this is one of the clunkier phrases. The best case that I can make for the line is this: there is a discomfort here to the suggestion that Persephone is an “existential / replica” of her mother. (The lineation, the odd enjambments, reinforce and lengthen that discomfort.) Previously, we had a rather unflattering contrast: Demeter raged, “punished the earth,” while Persephone is the victim in all this. Yet, the thought goes, the difference may be more of position than nature. What this aside does is permit there to be a difference, while rendering that difference abstract, hard to understand.

The speaker pulls back again. We have gotten dangerously close to treating these characters as if real and must remind ourselves that this is all a myth. “The characters / are not people.” But this reminder also comes with a removing of resistance for the next brush. “You are allowed to like / no one, you know.” Strange. We have an obvious reason to dislike Hades. The poem has suggested a cause for disliking Demeter. But Persephone?

Only, perhaps, if we disliked ourselves.

And on that note the poem suggests two diagrams for mapping the story: superego (Demeter), ego (Persephone), id (Hades); and heaven (Demeter), ego (Persephone), hell (Hades). This last is curious given the earlier identification of Demeter as goddess of the earth. Perhaps we are to understand a succession as having taken place, with Persephone taking up the place of the earth and Demeter reigning above, punishing her with winter. (Yet this identification cannot be taken stably; Persephone is a “born wanderer” not home on the earth.)

This at least is suggested by the next passage.

You must ask yourself:
where is it snowing?

But why must we? Because this is the point that the identification of Persephone with the earth turns on. We know the answer even before the cold wind tells us. It is snowing on earth: this is the form Demeter’s punishment takes. But it is snowing on earth precisely because Persephone is not there: she is punished in absentia. She is rather “having sex in hell.”

Here we return to the question of Persephone’s sensations more deeply and more directly. We find no certainty here, only the terrifying possibility that “something / blotted out the idea / of a mind.” This is not exactly death, but a kind of limbo. The limbo of adulthood, which is not exactly a freedom from childhood.

What keeps Persephone here is not just Hades’ incarceration, but a “passion for expiation” (reparation / guilt). Persephone herself seems to accept the terms of her mother’s punishment: she has somehow wronged by being taken. In this she is a perpetual subject. And still, also, diagrammatic: a stand-in for any subject, a “you,” a peg on which hangs ominous truths, “just meat.”

Throughout most of the poem, Hades has taken little attention. As he claims more space to the end, it is more as death itself than a narrative figure. The Freudian psychology here does not end at invoking the superego/ego/id diagram, but takes us to Freud’s death drive: the “rift in the human soul.” We are all inevitable disappointments, we withdraw from the world at first temporarily and then for good. This is a constant threat to society, to the world of mothers, the earth, which in turn asks us to “deny the rift.” (And, recall, the earth and this withdrawal are not something separate from us but an “aspect of a dilemma” we contain.)

The overall effect of “Persephone the Wanderer” is that of a panic attack. The surface incitement of a panic attack is circumstantial, a bad day at work, an argument, bad news, here a story. The anxieties that get worked through, however, quickly lose their particularity. All panic attacks are in the end the same: there is something fundamentally wrong with the human condition. “Where / the rift is, the break is.” The attack ends not in a kind of peace, but simply by exhaustion. At best in some ludicrous hope.