Analysis Of Myth By Natasha Trethewey

In her poem "Myth," Natasha Trethewey uses mythology, a unique structure, rhyme pattern, and punctuation to make form and content inseparable. Each of these elements serves to share the stages of grief one goes through one feels at the death of a loved one as well as the feelings of deep loss and longing.
In the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, the two get married but Eurydice quickly perishes. Overcome with grief Orpheus convinces Hades to let him bring back Eurydice to the world of the living. He agrees but on one condition; Eurydice has to walk behind Orpheus and he cannot look back to see if she's following. Orpheus agrees, but when the couple are just about to leave Erebus, Orpheus looks back to see his lover. With a final "Farewell" Eurydice

The "Erebus I keep you in" in line 4 represents the speakers dreams in which they still see their loved ones. Similar to Orpheus, the speaker tries taking said loved ones back with them "into morning" or back into the real world. However, they open their eyes to find that their loved one is still gone.
In "Myth" Trethewey uses a variant form of the villanelle to create the emotions she felt during her grief. Traditionally, a villanelle has five tercets followed by a quatrain with two repeating refrains and two repeating rhymes throughout the poem. Trethewey, however, changes this slightly.
However, she keeps the traditional rhyme scheme throughout the poem, creating this deep sense of loss, longing, and despair. The repeated –ing sounds such as dying, turning, and waking are symbolic of the speaker's way of dealing with grief. According to the English Oxford Dictionary, This -ing sound is a suffix that "denotes a verbal action, an instance of this, or its result. This sound indicates the grieving that the speaker experiences is interminable and never-ending. These feelings just keep happening, never seeming to have an

However, after all this time of trying to bring their loved one from the dream world to that of the living, the speaker wakes up and begins to move towards a different stage of the grief process. This waking up is also an allusion to the Greek Titan, Asteria, who was goddess of the nocturnal oracles and shooting stars. By using it to represent a star, this asterisk also symbolizes the time between sleeping and waking. At the unconscious level, the speakers longing for their beloved manifests in their dreams further reflecting the palindrome archetype throughout the poem as the two sides of "Myth" symbolize the readers dream-state and