Natasha Trethewey’s poem Myth is an emotional piece, published in her prize winning poetry book, Native Guard, in 2007. Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, where she was raised with her mother and father, a mixed race couple who ended up divorcing when she was six years old. After the divorce, she moved to Georgia to live with her mother, and spent the summers with her father. During this period of her life was when she began to understand the complex life of her mother and father 's relationship of being an interracial couple married in the early 60’s. This was also when Natasha began to write, because of her father pushing her to do so. However, not to long after the divorce, her father shot her mother, resulting in her death.
…show more content…
In the poem she makes it clear that she was having a hard time moving forward, as she shows us through her use of repetition and punctuation throughout the poem. Trethewey also uses the palindromic structure to show the readers how conflicted she is in her mother 's death. She mirrors the first half of the poem with the second half to give us the impression that she is in a consistent circle of grief and conflict. Finally, Trethewey uses Erebus as a metaphor for the darkness she felt, and the purgatory she felt she was stuck in after her mother 's death. She begins the poem drifting into sleep, awakening without her mother, and she ends by falling asleep, and leaving to be with her mother again. Similarly to Orpheus, following Eurydice into the underworld. In conclusion, Trethewey wrote the poem in what the reader can feel is a deep emotional state of despair, she is constantly running in circles, conflicted, unable to process her mother’s death. Yet, she separates the poem to make a shift in the poem, to separate the top from the bottom, however similar, are still very different. She leaves the poem with somethings left unsaid, and for the reader to figure out and process on their own. I interpret this as Trethewey in directly saying, “I’m stuck in the darkness, and lost in the
In the poem she makes it clear that she was having a hard time moving forward, as she shows us through her use of repetition and punctuation throughout the poem. Trethewey also uses the palindromic structure to show the readers how conflicted she is in her mother 's death. She mirrors the first half of the poem with the second half to give us the impression that she is in a consistent circle of grief and conflict. Finally, Trethewey uses Erebus as a metaphor for the darkness she felt, and the purgatory she felt she was stuck in after her mother 's death. She begins the poem drifting into sleep, awakening without her mother, and she ends by falling asleep, and leaving to be with her mother again. Similarly to Orpheus, following Eurydice into the underworld. In conclusion, Trethewey wrote the poem in what the reader can feel is a deep emotional state of despair, she is constantly running in circles, conflicted, unable to process her mother’s death. Yet, she separates the poem to make a shift in the poem, to separate the top from the bottom, however similar, are still very different. She leaves the poem with somethings left unsaid, and for the reader to figure out and process on their own. I interpret this as Trethewey in directly saying, “I’m stuck in the darkness, and lost in the