A suspicion, a doubt, a jealousy
grew in my mind,
which turned the hairs on my head to filthy snakes
as though my thoughts
hissed and spat on my scalp.
My bride’s breath soured, stank
in the grey bags of my lungs.
I’m foul mouthed now, foul tongued,
yellow fanged.
There are bullet tears in my eyes.
Are you terrified?
Be terrified.
It’s you I love,
perfect man, Greek God, my own;
but I know you’ll go, betray me, stray
from home.
So better by for me if you were stone.
I glanced at a buzzing bee,
a dull grey pebbly fell
to the ground.
I glanced at a singing bird,
a handful of dusty gravel
spattered down
I looked at a ginger cat,
a housebrick
shattered a bowl of milk.
I looked at a snuffling pig,
a boulder rolled
in a heap of shit.
I stared in the mirror.
Love gone bad
showed me a Gorgon.
I stared at a dragon.
Fire spewed
from the mouth of a mountain.
And here you come
with a shield for a heart
and a sword for a tongue
and your girls, your girls.
Wasn’t I beautiful
Wasn’t I fragrant and young?
Look at me now.
Medusa’s historical fate to reign queen of abjection and emasculation is emotively revised by Carol Ann Duffy in this arresting poem from The World’s Wife. Debate surrounds the original ‘rationale’ behind Medusa’s vindictive desire to turn all who come across her to stone. Some sources declare her a woman violated and wronged, others a woman punished for her irreverent libido. All agree however that it is the ‘heroic’ connivance and resourcefulnes of Perseus with his pragmatic use of a mirror which bring her reign of stony terror to an end. Pathos in the original versions is significantly diluted or absent. She inevitably deserves her decapitation and then exhibtion on a male shield, ironically protecting him from all he encounters. She becomes a mere servant of male potency, a woman punished and gone ‘mad’- truly her head is thus a metonymical warning against female transgression.
This poem however rescues Medusa from patriachal history. She emerges a tortured, besotted, distrustful romantic, whose trust has been destroyed by her relationships with ‘men’. Fear of being let down, of being betrayed , rather than innate malignancy is thus the origin of her rage, a rage then metamorphoised into one of mankind’s greatest terrors- the serpent.
The deployment of the dramatic monologue gives Medusa a voice both self-loathing and darkly comic. She is speaking from a place universally regarded as repulsive. For how can we forget our primal terror of the serpents crawling about her head? Such an image brings only anxiety and physical disgust: she is the very embodiment of the later associations with the bible and the Fall; the very reason we will suffer and stray., cast out into a world often dark and obscure. ( more later. therapy-stone, recurring trope In Duffy)