Myth

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2007

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Poem Analysis

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Further Reading & Resources

Related Poems

“Photograph: Ice Storm, 1971” by Natasha Trethewey (2006)

In this poem, which also appears in Native Guard ’s first section, Trethewey tries to find the reasons for what will happen to her mother’s life in a photograph in her life before her marriage to Grimmette. The photograph is of the small family on the “first morning” (Line 11) of an ice storm. It shows what is visible, even identifying “names, the date, the event” (Line 14). However, the photograph doesn’t fully capture “what’s inside” (Line 15) her mother, “a woman, suffering, / made luminous by the camera’s eye” (Lines 2-3). It doesn’t predict her “stepfather’s fist” (Line 15). Again, like “Myth,” the poem is an attempt to capture and to make sense of why subsequent events unfolded as they did, and grapples with memory and loss.

“After Your Death” by Natasha Trethewey (2006)

This poem was collected into Monument (2018), but it first appeared in Native Guard as the poem directly preceding “Myth.” In it, Trethewey cleans her dead mother’s home, and later, outside, picks a “ripe fig loose from its stem” (Line 6). However, it is “being taken from the inside: // a swarm of insects hollowing it” (Lines 9-10). Trethewey notes “I’m too late, / again, another space emptied by loss” (Lines 10-11), making the fruit a metaphor for her helplessness and despair. This feeling of emptiness and being too “late” (Line 10) to change anything is echoed in “Myth.”

Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Trethewey (2020)

This is a memoir about Trethewey and her mother, and what led her mother to her relationship with Grimmette and its tragic results. While it was written after “Myth,” it deals with the same subject matter, and the pre-prologue, titled “[ ]” features a dream that uses much of the same imagery as “Myth.” In it, she notes that she wakes from the dream of her stepfather shooting her mother, screaming “No!” and that her last question becomes a “refrain” for her: “Do you know what it means to have a wound that never heals?” Trethewey has noted that her mother’s murder, which happened when she was only 19, has shaped much of her art and her life.

Further Literary Resources

“Natasha Trethewey on Myths, Grief, and Joy” by Monika Dziamka (2021)

Besides discussing her memoir Memorial Drive with Dziamka in this interview for The Southern Review of Books, Trethewey directly talks about the creation of the poem “Myth.” She mentions the poem “behaves as a palindrome; it enacts the descent into the part of sleep where we dream,” and that she deliberately tied it to the myth of “Orpheus and Eurydice.” She talks about the “liminal place” between dreaming and waking, and how upon waking, she knew she “left [my mother] back in that world of dream where I’ve seen her, where she’s alive, but she’s out of reach.” Trethewey also mentions how childhood traumatic events influenced her writing: “one of my attempts to control the world I was living in was to organize things, which is the kind of poet I am. I am interested in a kind of order and symmetry.”

“Building a Monument: An Interview with Natasha Trethewey” by Lauren LeBlanc (2018)

Trethewey talked with LeBlanc for The Paris Review. LeBlanc and Trethewey discuss history, race, memory, and the importance of her mother as a subject matter for her poems. Trethewey also mentions how as a student she was told by a professor to “‘[u]nburden yourself of being black. Unburden yourself of the death of your mother’ [. . .] The two things that had so shaped my experience of the world, I was being told to unburden. Yeah, okay.” She chose to respond by writing about these two things in all her work. She explains how poems are not just ways to talk about despair but also engender “a sense of empathy” and are “moments of resurrection.” In confronting her mother’s death, “my living mother is with me, too. That’s the seed planted in my heart that grows and grows.”

“On Natasha Trethewey’s ‘Myth’” by Susan B. A. Somers-Willett (2013)

Somers-Willett, a poet herself, analyzes Trethewey’s “Myth.” She notes its connections to “Orpheus and Eurydice,” the general process of grief, and Trethewey’s experience of losing her mother. She spends a good deal of time discussing the syntax of the poem, its function as a palindrome, and its use of punctuation. She also quotes Trethewey’s interview with Jonathan Fink in which she states she didn’t realize it was going to be a palindrome but found the ninth line to be a “hinge” so “the movement could enact that movement of descending and then returning.”

Listen to Poem

Natasha Trethewey Reads “Myth”

This recording is from University of California Television and documents a reading Trethewey gave for the Lunch Poems series. Trethewey read in April of 2010. “Myth” appears at the 10:40 timestamp, and Trethewey notes the poem’s allusion to “Orpheus and Eurydice.”