Demeter's Prayer To Hades By Rita Dove

In “Demeter’s Prayer to Hades,” by Rita Dove, shows a mix between Greek mythology and contemporary ideas. She created a poem that emphasizes a mother’s prayer towards the man who stole her daughter from her. Rita Dove used language to stress that no one can escape the repercussions of their decisions so they need to consider their choices carefully to avoid potentially destructive consequences. Rita Dove’s language in the poem provokes the reader to think about the aftermath of making decisions. In the poem she wrote, “each desire has an edge,” (l. 2) the word edge at the end of the poem creates a new way to think of one’s desires. While reading edge, the first image that comes to my mind is the edge of a knife or a cliff. It implies that desire can go multiple ways. One side could be sharp and hurt you while the dull side can be safe. You could also plummet off the cliff and hit the ground or the cliff can be off the side of the ocean where you purposely jump off the cliff to plunge into the water, which could also mean that falling into desire is like taking a …show more content…
There is an outcome as well as a consequence to every choice we make. These consequences are emphasized in the story from the article “The Reason for Seasons” by Lin Donn, which is about when Hades stole Persephone and took her to the underworld, her mother Demeter became extremely distraught and she did not care to do her job with the crops. She let all the crops die and created an extremely harsh winter. This cause many mortals to die all because Hades decided to trick Persephone into remaining in the underworld. His unintentional consequences made Demeter react in a way that killed many humans and created winter, which killed the crops for six months of the year. These repercussions are inescapable as a god or a mortal and should be considered when making a decision about things like desire, faith and even