Myths about Women

Persephone is the goddess of the underworld in Greek mythology. She is the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, goddess of the harvest. Persephone was such a beautiful young woman that everyone loved her, even Hades wanted her for himself. One day, when she was collecting flowers on the plain of Enna, the earth suddenly opened and Hades rose up from the gap and abducted her. None but Zeus, and the all-seeing sun, Helios, had noticed it. Broken-hearted, Demeter wandered the earth, looking for her daughter until Helios revealed what had happened. Demeter was so angry that she withdrew herself in loneliness, and the earth ceased to be fertile. Knowing this could not continue much longer, Zeus sent Hermes down to Hades to make him release Persephone. Hades grudgingly agreed, but before she went back he gave Persephone a pomegranate (or the seeds of a pomegranate, according to some sources). When she later ate of it, it bound her to underworld forever and she had to stay there one-third of the year. The other months she stayed with her mother. When Persephone was in Hades, Demeter refused to let anything grow and winter began. This myth is a symbol of the budding and dying of nature.

1) How does Eavan Boland reflect on the roles she has played in imaginging herself in relation to the Ceres/Persephone myth.

2) How does Boland use “The Pomegranate (565) as a mythic symbol in the poem?

3) What point does Boland make about mothers and daughters in “The Poemegranate.

Semele was the daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia, and the mother, by Zeus, of the god Dionysus. Because Zeus slept with Semele secretly, Hera only found out about the affair after the girl was pregnant. Bent on revenge, Hera disguised herself and persuaded Semele to demand that Zeus come to her in all the splendor with which he visited Hera. As a result, Semele asked Zeus to grant an unspecified favor, and got him to swear by the river Styx that he would grant it. Unable to break his oath, Zeus came to her armed in his thunder and lightning, and Semele was destroyed. However, Zeus rescued the unborn child from the mother's ashes and sewed it in his thigh until it was ready to be born. Thus Dionysus is sometimes called "the twice- born." Dionysus was raised at first by Semele's sister and brother-in-law, Ino and Athamus, and later by the nymphs of Nysa. As an adult, he retrieved his mother from Hades and made her a goddess; she was called Thyone.

4) Reflect on Carolyn Kizer’s adaptation of the Semele myth. What was your experience of this poem?

5) What do you think the point is in Kizer’s title and what do you make of her representations of feminine corporeality? What point is she making here.

6) How do you interpret the poem’s ending resolution?