A Commentary on Demeter: Perhaps Carol Ann Duffy's finest poem?

‘

 

 

 

Where i lived – winter and hard earth.
i sat in my cold stone room
choosing tough words, granite, flint,

to break the ice. My broken heart –
i tried that, but it skimmed,
flat, over the frozen lake.

She came from a long, long way,
but i saw her at last, walking,
my daughter, my girl, across the fields,

In bare feet, bringing all spring’s flowers
to her mother’s house. i swear
the air softened and warmed as she moved,

the blue sky smiling, none too soon,
with the small shy mouth of a new moon.’

Demeter. Carol Ann Duffy.

 

 

Demeter: A few Thoughts.

The poem explores the myth of Demeter and her daughter Persephone in a profoundly intimate way.  The original story centres on the Greek Goddess Demeter’s loss of her daughter Peresphone to Hades, the King of the Underworld. Demeter in her grief and anger plunges the world into everlasting winter until her daughter is returned to her by Hades after pressure from other Gods. However Persephone has eaten pomegranate seeds and this makes it impossible to leave the underworld permanently so Persephone has to spend part of the year with Hades and part of the year with Demeter. Thus the earth’s calendar reflects the experience of loss or growth according to the whereabouts of Persephone in relation to Demeter. It reflects life’s cycle and our recurring encounter with loss. Hence we can read the poem as an exploration of maternal or parental love: as a poem about Romantic love: as a poem about illlness and recovery; but in the end it is just – monumentally about love.

Duffy takes the sonnet ; a rigorous and formally constraining poetic form, to explore the tension between loss and resurrection; between abject despair and the revelation of hope.  

And the deeply affecting irony of the poem is that it is Demeter who is as dead as Persephone. Loss may kill the mourner as much as the mourned. So that the experience of resurrection is as much Demeter’s experience as that of her daughter Persophone’s. This ‘truth’ is central to the poem’s message and affect.

 

Having  said all that of course what makes the poem work(it reduces me to tears each time I read it) is its exploration of loss and reconciliation. These are universal experiences and the peculiar attentiveness of the poem to the abject realities of grief is singularly affecting.

‘Where I lived- winter and hard earth.’

Life is but incidental when the child/beloved is gone. Place is arbitrary and casually voiced. The world is a barren infertile land  for the mother and the sharpness of the images reveals the irredeemable suffering. Demeter’s language presents the reader with her immmunity/indifference to anything in the world. Even, and especially her words, resist involvement and connection : nothing and no one get to reach her. She cannot bring her daughter( and by implication herself)  back from the place of the dead. Words have betrayed her or deserted her, and are arid and cold.

The apparent inversion of:

‘to break the ice. My broken heart -‘

reveals the disordering reality of grief. It also makes heart dominate the stanza, as her ‘heart’ literally stands over the second  stanza..loosened from its moorings by the awkwardness of its sense achieved  through its odd positioning.

 Note also  the suspense created by the ‘ -‘ which hangs off the line. Unfinished business. The past is only ever finished, never finished with.

 

The psychical state of Demeter, the grief struck mother, is utterly abject. She is immovable in the devastating experience  of loss. Demeter has not even been able to use a pronoun for Persephone let alone pronounce her name. Yet we know that the name of her child, of her beloved, is as ALL she can think on.

Then comes the monumental change: the incredible intervention of hope. How fragile is the realisation of the perspective that the poem now delivers?

‘She came from a long, long way,

but I saw her at last, walking,

my daughter, my girl, across the fields,’ ( emphasis added)

The sense of revelation is palpable ( my favourite word on the blog I think!) Persephone is re-entering the world of life after inhabiting the underworld, the world of the dead. Demeter’s world and words have returned to her. Love is  the resurrection and the life.

We see the reanimation of the mother’s ‘dead’ words through this sighting and reunion. Demeter uses just the pronoun ‘she’ as ‘she’ is all the world to her and has been thinking of her all the time.

Only love can make us so pointedly referential? There can be no ambiguity about the identity of the ‘she’ as ‘she’ is all the world and all the words to Demeter.

The repetition of ‘long’ communicates the distance that Persephone has to come to be with her mother and the time that Demeter has had to endure without her. It engenders a deeply emotive sense of longevity without the beloved. Repetition underlines the recollection of Demeter. What suffering and utter relief is communicated at times through an echo of our voice alone or the faint hope that what we do hear is the return of the beloved.  

She uses the  language of maternal and even romantic love: ‘my daughter’ ‘my girl’ as the two elide in the acknowledgement that this above all else is a love poem. It testifies to the endurance of love and the euphoria of reunion and reconcilation. The immmense pride and fiercely proprietorial acknowledgement: ‘my daughter, my girl.’

Maternal ‘territory’ is regained. How much we all need someone to be uniquely special to us.

‘bare feet’ gives us the magical free -spiritedness of Persephone and her ‘gift’ of liberation for her mother’s battered heart. It is wonderfully tender. It has the lightness of joy; the pure  nakedness of utter  adoration.

Duffy superbly moves the poem’s persepective now away from the ‘I’  of Demeter’s  suffocating grief, to
Demeter being observed ‘outside’ herself as a ‘mother’…representative of a universal relationship. It also shows how unbelievable, her incredible happiness is, and this increbility  makes her view herself as an outsider, in slow motion ‘beyond’ the limitation of one self.

The emotional resonance of ‘I swear’ is profound. A moment of catharsis in the poem. The enjambement as the poem runs on shows how the emotions of  the mother cannot be contained or held in check from one stanza to another. The poem overflows itself time and time agian with feeling.  

This is love: love seemingly lost forever and then regained. I can type out these words but they are  flat on the paper and banal. It is Duffy’s poem about Demeter  which makes us know what they might mean.

‘ with the small shy mouth of a new moon.’

Change. Hesitation.Meeting again.Renewal.The most tender of all kisses. A new cycle.

Rebirth!

Wonderful.