Eurydice: Ancient and Modern. By Kasia Middleton

Eurydice: Ancient and Modern. By Kasia Middleton

I was recently skimming one of my favourite poetry collections when I came across a piece I hadn’t read before. The collection in question was Duffy’s The World’s Wife and the poem was Eurydice. Poetry has always been something of a mystery to me- I have often found myself baffled by a poem, not knowing how to make anything of it. The words are on the page, I can read them, I could give you a decent definition of each one, but when they’re put together, they become blurred, a mystery. But what continues my interest in poetry is that wonderful moment where you find a poem that you just get. You could write endlessly about it, and all the words blend together seamlessly, rolling off the page and straight into understanding. It was raining outside when I read Eurydice, and as I read the words “bloodless ghosts”, the wind howled outside my window. But far from the melodrama that Mother Nature seemed to be suggesting, the poem made me laugh. Carol Ann Duffy took one of my favourite tragic stories, from one of my favourite pieces of ancient writing, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and she made it funny.

 

For context, the story of Eurydice and her lover Orpheus is far from comical. The two were madly in love, and in Ovid’s version of the story, are getting married, haunted by bad omens. On their way home, Eurydice, youthful and beautiful, falls down dead, bitten by a snake. Orpheus, devastated by his loss, makes his way down into the Underworld, and sings a song to win her back. He is a masterful musician, and Ovid gives us a picture of all the famous punishments of the underworld simply halting for the beauty of his song: “Tantalus ceased to clutch at the fleeting pool, Ixion’s wheel was spellbound, the vultures halted their pecking at Tityos’ liver, the Danaids dropped their urns and Sisyphus sat on his rock.” Even for someone like me, for whom interpreting poetry is often an uphill battle, this is emotive language. These eternal punishments simply stop, and Orpheus softens the hearts of the monarchs of the dead sufficiently for them to allow him to take Eurydice back up, on the condition that on their way to the surface, he doesn’t look back at her until they reach the land of the living. But of course, Orpheus turns around, and Eurydice fades back into the shades of the dead. She doesn’t complain about this, and Ovid explains why with one of my favourite lines of Western literature: “What could she complain of, except that he’d loved her?”

 

I have been mesmerised by the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice since I first heard it told as a child, and I heard the reason for this put into elegant words in a podcast recently. Natalie Haynes suggests that the reason the myth is so enduring is because of “the proximity of success and the totality of failure”. Orpheus is so close to retrieving his lover, but at the last second, turns around. He cannot return a second time. If only he had been able to hold on. He has no one to blame for his failure but himself, and must live with that, alone. Utterly tragic and heart-breaking every time you read it. There is something in my mind, whenever I encounter the story, that says maybe, just maybe, Eurydice will make it out this time. Indeed, there are versions of the myth that say she does, in Isocrates’ Busiris for instance, but the fullest ancient versions we have, those of Ovid, and the earlier version from Virgil, relate the tale in all the tragic splendour it is best known for today.

 

In fact, before we move on to Duffy’s interpretation of the myth, it is probably best to discuss how the ancients saw Orpheus. The story is originally Greek, but no full Greek versions survive to us. The earliest version we have comes from Virgil’s Georgics, a strange work to describe. It’s sort of farming manual, which also talks about how wonderful Rome is now that the civil war has finally ended. Orpheus and Eurydice come into the tale in book 4, all about bees. The bee-keeper, Aristaeus, loses his colonies, and in searching for new ones, encounters Eurydice. His pursuit of her, in Virgil’s version of the myth, is what causes her not to see the snake that she steps on and that kills her. The Latin is very blunt in describing Aristaeus’ abuse of Eurydice- Virgil very much portrays her as a victim. When Orpheus finds out Eurydice has died, his song makes rocks weep. He then goes down into Hades to retrieve her, and the myth continues in much the same way as in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. These are the two fullest versions of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice that we now have, and they are both Roman, so what of Greece? Is that not where the myth originates?

 

In Euripides’ 438 BC play Admetus and Alcestis, reference is made to the myth of Eurydice. Admetus is a king, granted the ability to cheat death if only someone will die in his place. The problem is, the only person that volunteers is his wife, Alcestis. She is eventually retrieved by Heracles, but before this, Admetus claims that if only he had the song of Orpheus, he would be able to move the powers of the Underworld enough that they would give Alcestis back. The two stories of Admetus and Alcestis and of Orpheus and Eurydice inspired much debate for their contrasts. In Plato’s Symposium, a debate about love, a character, Phaedrus, claims that Orpheus was in fact a coward, who didn’t love Eurydice enough to kill himself and go to Hades by the traditional route. Others claim that Orpheus loved Eurydice too much, that it was his hamartia, and so he would never be able to get her back anyway. Since Heracles held no love for Alcestis, that is why he was able to retrieve her. Discussion around the story in the ancient world tended to focus on the love that Orpheus held for Eurydice, but typically, there was little to no consideration as to how Eurydice felt about the whole situation.

 

However, recently, there has been an increase in retellings of ancient stories to include the female perspective. To name a few: A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes, Circe by Madeline Miller, The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood, and the one I was reading, The World’s Wife by Carol Ann Duffy. The latter is not entirely classical, but there are a lot of references to ancient mythical women, one of whom is, of course, Eurydice.  If you haven’t read her poem of the same name, here is a link: https://genius.com/Carol-ann-duffy-eurydice-annotated

 

The poem is a take on the classic tale in which Eurydice finally is given a voice. She makes it clear that she was in fact, perfectly comfortable being down amongst the dead, instead of trapped in Orpheus’ poetry and arrogance. The biggest twist in the tale is that Eurydice actually sends herself back down by convincing Orpheus to turn around. She plays on his arrogance, asking him to recite her a poem and getting released from the sentence that would be staying with him forever. This is a fascinating interpretation of the tale, as Duffy doesn’t really change any of the original elements. After all, what evidence is there that ancient Eurydice didn’t feel exactly the same way? In Ovid’s version of the myth, she doesn’t complain about being sent back to Hades, and the first interpretation we think of is that she is simply too virtuous to whinge. However, Duffy offers the interpretation that she was quite happy to be independent, even if it meant she was dead. In her poem, she even parodies lines from the original Ovid, such as: “Sisyphus sat on his rock for the first time in years. Tantalus was permitted a couple of beers”. This is why the poem made me laugh. Duffy’s wit comes through in her interpretation and connects the ancient tale of Orpheus and Eurydice to a modern audience.

 

I think as well as Natalie Haynes’ explanation as to why the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice endures, we must also consider that it is perhaps the tale’s openness to interpretation that means people continue to be fascinated by it. Is it simply a tragic tale of two lovers that were not destined to be together? Is it a commentary on the harmful nature of the male gaze? Is it a discussion of the finality of death? Does it explore gender dynamics? The after-life? Arrogance? The power of art and poetry?

 

The point is, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice can be all of those things, and that is the beauty of so many classical myths. They offer themselves up for interpretation, even today, and continue to inspire many wonderful works of poetry and fiction. Like I said, poetry is often an enigma to me, but when I read Duffy’s poem, it resonated with me, since it offered up the chance to think differently about a story that was a childhood favourite. Although poetry is difficult to understand, I think that’s the point- it offers new interpretations and ideas about things that we think we already understand and prompts us to think differently.