The Poet's Journey to the Underworld
Poems About the Underworld Features "Orpheus Alone" by Mark Strand
Metaphor of Descent and Rebirth
Poets have always been interested in the journey of descent whether into the underworld as in early Greek myths of Persephone’s abduction by Hades or Orpheus in search of his beloved Eurydice. Ever since the days of Virgil right up to modern day, stories of descent have been the topic of poets. They are metaphorical descents, of course, for no one really means to enter the word of the dead and return. So what are these journeys meant to signify?
Called to Transformation
Traditionally, with each descent a transformation is in order. The hero or heroine sacrifices herself to the journey in order to arrive at a larger vision. As in any hero’s journey, sometimes there is success, sometimes not. But in any case it is the mystery of rebirth through transformation one has been called to, and this is the stuff of poetry and myth.
The Poets’ Collective Unconscious
Carl Jung named the place from which all dreams arise, streaming just below conscious mind, the collective unconscious. Not surprising then that poets from across time have taken up this journey, using essentially the imagery of the ancient Greeks. Beginning with Virgil, one of the earliest poets after Orpheus to tune his harp to the underworld:
a cavern there was that yawned abysmal and vast—jagged and
quartered by its sunless lake and the midnight of its groves—over whose mouth no winged thing could fly unscathed, so poisonous the breath that, exhaling from
its pitchy jaws, steamed up to the sky.
Orpheus and Eurydice
Skipping across the centuries to the great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke whose Orpheus again makes his fated descent to bring back his dear Eurydice. Notice one crosses through the same landscape.
That was the deep uncanny mine of souls,…
There were cliffs there, / and forests made of mist. There were bridges/ spanning the void, and that great gray blind lake/ which hung above its distant bottom/ like sky on a rainy day above/ a landscape
One might ask is it only that Rilke had read his Virgil and so echoed the famous Greek, or is a larger truth at work here? Are these poems arising from that great collective unconscious alive in the poet where these myths converge?
“Orpheus Alone”
Here is another great poet of our own times, Mark Strand, who takes the same journey in his poem “Orpheus Alone”:
It was an adventure much could be made of: a walk
On shores of the darkest known river,
Among the hooded, shoving crowds, by steaming rocks
And rows of ruined huts half-buried in the muck;
Then to the great court with its marble yard
Whose emptiness gave him the creeps, and to sit there
In the sunken silence of the place and speak
Of what he had lost…
A Contemporary Journey
Call it a journey to the underworld to retrieve dying souls or a departure to the study to bring words up from the unconscious, a descent always involves a disappearing act. These are journeys meant for transformation. Anytime one is heading out, leaving one known way of life for another and for any variety of reason, ie. divorce, death, loss of employment, money—it is an entry into a kind of wilderness of unknown scope, range and depth. In the case of the poet, painter, writer, this descent is made again and again.
The Poet’s Way
It becomes a way of life for the artistic enterprise, for which the outcome is always unknown. Is it any wonder that the journey involves entry into the same underworld which is the underworld of the collective unconscious? It is the work of poets to make this descent and return with the goods for transformation.
Sources
Bodkin, M. (1978). Archetypal patterns in poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rilke, R. M. (1989). The selected poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. (S. Mitchell. Ed. and
Trans.). New York: Vintage International.
Strand, M. (1993). The continuous life. New York: Alfred A. Knoph.
