Mother Love by Rita Dove
Rita Dove’s Mother Love poems explore the evolving relationship between mother and daughter using the infamous story of mythical figures Demeter, Persephone, and Hades. However, instead of trying to bear witness to their story or provide a new narrative to speak for these character Dove opts to use them for a greater purpose. The author instead chooses to use these characters as tool and embody what they symbolize, in order to focus on the cycles of women in terms of being a daughter, aging through a risky world, and becoming a mother who watches and worries.
In the beginning of Mother Love, the young girl in the poems is a wander, who continues to run into less than safe situations while lacking the physical protection of her mother. These poems are a projection of the narrative of Persephone who was meandering on her own when danger, in the form of Hades, found her. We get a clear sense of this first in “Persephone, Falling,” where Dove uses the goddess’s abduction to transition to a realistic conversation a mother would have with her child about the being careful of strangers. “…He claimed her. It is finished. No one heard her…go straight to school. This is important, stop fooling around…” (9). Later there is a shift in the collection as the daughter ages, she becomes more aware of the world and how her mom perceives it. “Persephone in Hell” brings to life the transformation young women go through as they become adults, adopting their own ethics and rules to live by after having lived experience separate from their mothers. “Mother worried. Mother with her frilly ideals gave me money to call home every day, but she couldn’t know what I was feeling; I was doing what she didn’t need to know. I was doing everything and feeling nothing” (25). This is comparable to what happened in the case of Persephone as she spent time in Hell, living a life that is foreign to Demeter.
Dove switches gears to Demeter, pedal stooling her as a mother archetype and using the goddess as a channel to project her own feelings as a mother grieving her daughter’s innocence. “She is gone again and I will not bear it, I will drag my grief through a winter of my own making…Then I will sit down to wait for her. Yes” (56). Dove’s approach to this well known trio is clever. Rather than telling their stories she uses the gods as devices to emphasize her perspective on the evolution of mother-daughter relationship. This is a technique I can reference when editing my own poems that borrow from mythical figures like Persephone, Ares or Aphrodite. Going forward I will ask myself how I can relate them and their stories to mine.