I, Persephone; I, Demeter

 

 

 

I have only ever existed as female. First, as Persephone; then, as Demeter. I didn’t choose to be either. There lies the problem.

 

Two girls there are: within the house

One sits; the other, without.

Daylong a duet of shade and light

Plays between these.[1]

 

As sure as the sun rises and sets.

 

Through the ancient Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, a story that encapsulates the mother-daughter bond, despite its gross complexities, the inevitability of this relationship is conveyed, driven by the changing seasons of womanhood, as a young girl charts her way to maturity and independence to the dismay of her fiercely protective mother.

 

Of course, this is but one interpretation; ‘The myth appears to have particular resonance for women, and many seem to feel that in some sense it is the myth for them’.[2]

 

Of course, it is. The myth, as Christine Downing puts it, ‘valorises the beauty and the power of the mother-daughter bond’.[3]

 

I am reluctant to accept the myth inhabits me.  I am reluctant to believe I am only ever one or the other; Persephone or Demeter.

 

But all women are born of a woman. We are all daughters, each of us Persephone. I, Persephone belongs to all women as much as it belongs to me. How can the first-person singular be shared? How can this myth tell of my ‘I’ and the ‘I’ of all women? A tale of innocence lost, rebellion, rejection, rage, resentment, reconciliation; the deep connection between two women; a communal female experience, we are all daughters who have become independent of our mothers. Slaves to femininity, cycles, and seasons. It’s overwhelming to think each woman experiences these vast disruptions of growth yet I imagine each woman can find themselves within the Persephone/Demeter story.

 

Is it true that we each harbour a deep desire to create ourselves separate from our mother? That fertility compels us to create our own Persephone who will ultimately become the same I, Persephone we have all once been? How can we strive for individuality if we are all confined by the same role?

 

I have been Persephone, rejecting my mother as my own psyche emerged and expanded through adolescence, as external influence and internal creative desire urged me to form my own ‘I’. And now, I, Demeter, have forgotten my I, Persephone, as I tend to the myth through my own daughters, watching, powerless, as they now inhabit the role of Persephone, each establishing their own ‘I’, with their crop tops and pin-locked phones, approaching their inevitable detachment from me, their Demeter.

 

***

 

Psychoanalyst, Hans Loewald, confirms the need to ‘differentiate and individuate’ from the mother, and as I developed the crucial structure of self-awareness through adolescence, causing me to understand myself in relation to, and, as separate from her, I felt it an overpowering compulsion.[4] At the stage in physical and psychological development, when the daughter begins to seek her own identity, ‘the mother-daughter relationship may overwhelm and invade both the mother’s and the daughter’s psyche’, and they begin to exist in constant tension, the ‘adolescent’s struggle for autonomy’ causing the subliminal connection ‘between [the] two alike bodies’ of mother and daughter, as resistance develops and the relationship starts to change. [5][6]

 

***

 

She smoked. I despised it.

So I went to the shop

 and bought a pack

of ten Club Kingsize

and smoked every one

 until I was sick.

 

***

 

If I am only ever I, Persephone or I, Demeter, is the ‘I’ in my writing authentic? Original? Individual? If the myth is every woman’s story, am I merely writing what has already been written? Are the tales of the mother daughter relationship in its variant forms, from Woolf to Plath, Austen to Atwood, a collective attempt at expressing elements of the complexities of this one defining relationship?

 

Is that all I have to write about?

 

Is our attempt to write, and read, the mother-daughter relationship simply a desperate and futile endeavour to understanding? Even though we all share the same story, not one single writer can express it in its completeness, on behalf of all our ‘I’s. Perhaps because, while the characters and plot essentially remain the same, we each perform differently the roles of Persephone and Demeter.

 

And I wonder, is there any other female ‘I’ before, between or beyond Persephone and Demeter?

 

When the first-person pronoun opens her doors, I am first over the threshold.

 

***

 

The female mind is indivisible to the physical experience of being female, each woman consumed by her own astonishingly multifaceted and complex physical and emotional identity. However, our perception of our bodies remains distorted, presumably as a result of centuries of patriarchal domination. Adrienne Rich asserts, ‘Like intense relationships between women in general, the relationship between mother and daughter has been profoundly threatening to men’.[7] Through the filter of patriarchy, our female bodies simultaneously confuse, excite and shame us. While we can physically make, grow and feed people, providing empathy and nurture in abundance, we have been historically, and continue to be, undermined, undervalued and suppressed. Elizabeth Grosz writes, ‘On the negative view, women’s bodies are regarded as an inherent limitation on women’s capacity for equality, while on the positive side, women’s bodies and experiences are seen to provide women with a special insight, something that men lack’.[8]

 

It is a challenge of female writing to not write about the female body experience. As a female writer, it is inevitable that the changing body and its capabilities are written, and that we cannot understand our experience of womanhood unless in relation to our first and most significant female relationship. To write the mother-daughter story is a rite of passage, the essence of every woman’s story.

 

What else would I write?

 

***

 

Through the filter of their ‘I’, and through the shared ‘I’, I am retold time and time again. I am Lily Briscoe in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse as I yearn for ‘not knowledge but unity…. intimacy’ with ‘the chambers of the mind and heart of the woman who was, physically touching [me]’ in my childhood.[9] The power of Woolf’s depictions of my mother’s ‘delicious fecundity… the fountain and spray of life’ capture her immense power, and my deep desire to love and be loved by her.[10] Although we shared a ‘psychic osmosis which, at times, was very wonderful and comforting’, she was never available, enough, to satisfy my needs.[11] Annie Kincaid invites you to feel the blissful state of maternal love that was once mine, writing how my mother would ‘stoop down and kiss me on the lips and then on my neck. It was in such a paradise that I lived’.[12]

 

***

 

The urge of the fertile body is immense; a desire to create that which we must then physically expel. The female body rejects mucous, faeces and menstrual fluid, and also, the foetus. Is the unborn baby repugnant as mucous that it must be expelled from the body? Does the pain of childbirth arise from the body’s powerful need to birth, or its inability to prevent the overpowering expulsion? Women who reach the physical phenomena of labour become as powerless as the newborn child.

 

***

 

The mother-daughter split is a disruption neither would welcome, yet the changing body of woman is unyielding, halting nature is impossible, inevitably certain. As the body develops, it brings significant and perplexing change. From the sprouting pubic hair of pre-pubescence to the sagging jowls of mid-life, from the sexual secretions of adolescence to the dried vulvas of old-age, women’s bodies are in constant flux, each of us living the same predictable (and repulsive?) process. 

 

***

 

Catching sight of myself in the rear-view mirror, I squirm. Daylight is unforgiving. The fault lines have deepened across my face, familiar cracks rupturing my façade; a map of female lineage, I feel helpless in my pride and shame.

 

***

 

With changing seasons in Annie John, Kincaid’s coming of age novel, I became ‘long and bony, my nose ‘suddenly spread across my face’ and ‘I wondered about that strange girl’ who stared at me from the mirror.[13] I inhabit that novel like a full term baby in the womb. But I/Annie was no longer worthy of my/her mother’s lingering attention; ‘Absolutely not! You and I don’t have time for that anymore’ and I felt the ‘ground wash out from under me’.[14] Our physical change was a rapid and violent breach, not only from our child self, but also our mother. Yet she changed with the seasons, as I did.

 

***

 

Thinning hair

and fine lines,

reflection changing

as she waits.

.

 

 

***

 

In the poem, ‘Demeter to Persephone’, Alicia Ostriker describes my stubborn ‘firm little breasts’ intruding against my mother’s formidable ‘amplitude’.[15] If we were both changing, there was nothing we could do to stop it. In ‘Persephone at the Mall’, unpunctuated, I am blindly and willingly 

 

          trying on the allure

of the body like the platform heels

and mini- skirts you wore at her age

…

her body a new

continent she is exploring [16]

 

The confines of my small female body juxtaposed against vast uncharted territory. In an attempt to escape, ‘the horrible mantle of daughterliness still clinging’ to me in ‘The Myth Of Innocence’, I began to create myself in the blank map that was my new altered body.[17] What else was I to do but inhabit my own skin, if I can’t inhabit my mother’s?

 

I’ve only just realised that ‘I’ stands for inhabit.

 

And I no longer pined for but rejected my mother. Her voice, her touch, her presence; all stifling and now repulsive to me. And Louise Gluck knew when she asked, ‘why is my mother’s body safe?’ that it no longer was.[18] There was no room for me within her, and the child I was had come and gone. So I gave birth to myself.

 

But these things take time;

 

          It would be hard on a young girl

          to go so quickly from bright light to utter darkness.[19]

 

          Gradually, he thought, he’d introduce the night,

          first as the shadows of fluttering leaves.

Then moon, then stars. Then no moon, no stars.

          Let Persephone get used to it slowly.[20]      

 

In the end, I did not find it comforting,

 

As I strolled through her poetry, Gluck isolated my captivity, as if no amount of wandering would ever release me;

 

‘she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter’.[21]

 

‘I’ am nowhere to be found in that sentence but the tension between us is clear. But there I am, in ‘Persephone Falling’, exercising free will when I ‘stooped to pull harder’ the narcissus that lured me to pluck.[22] My need for severance evident in ‘A Myth of Innocence’, as I complain ‘I am never alone’, the attachment to my mother repressive, I begin ‘turning the thought into prayer’.[23] How confused and helpless I was;

 

          I was abducted, but it sounds

          wrong to her, nothing like what she felt.

          Then she says, I was not abducted.

Then she says, I offered myself, I wanted

to escape my body. Even sometimes,

I willed this.[24]

 

A stanza of five ‘I’s and three ‘she’s; made me stop and think. Did she tell me I was abducted or did I tell her? And now I don’t know what to believe because it is just memory.

 

***

 

          My mother

          was a beautiful woman-

          they all said so.

         

          I have to imagine

          everything

she said

         

          I have to act

as though there is actually

 a map to that place:

 

          when you were a child[25]

 

Memory erases the paradise we knew before the myth took hold, and I spend my life trying to find the map.

 

***

 

Jessie Greengrass tells me, ‘I can’t imagine any decision more selfish than… to bring another person into this world without their say-so’.[26] And from the moment of birth, the process of dying begins. Exiled and ageing its way to an inevitable fate. How ironic, the gift of life? Thanks, I think.

 

***

 

And, whatever, I have been guilty ever since;

 

                  she doesn’t know

what winter is, only that

she is what causes it.[27]

 

Clauses of blame, the winter between us, caused by my wandering? But she wandered too. Yet, ‘without her death I would have been undone’.[28] Jessie Greengrass employs simple but loaded language to convey my struggle to establish a separate identity. Throughout Sight, my mother’s presence is ‘a muttered thrum beneath all other conversation’, yet my memories of how I felt when I was with her remain clear and detailed.[29] 

 

I am a blank slate for the writer, so why do they choose not to give me a voice? Gluck thinks I deserve one, giving me lots of ‘I’s. She’s clever that way as she understands the first-person pronoun. While her economical syntax and simple language allows for demystification of my complex story, she gifts you, the reader, VIP entry to the ‘I’ lounge. Gluck’s conversational language allows an intimacy between narrator and reader, letting you inhabit the poem alongside me. You become the I. And while you are there, as Gluck’s guest and captive audience, she loves to ask questions; ‘What is in her mind?’, ‘Is she afraid?’, ‘Who does she see?’. [30] I gain voice, you gain access and freedom for thoughts to wander. ‘You must ask yourself?’, ‘you will forget everything’; who is the ‘you’ Gluck addresses?[31] The reader is given much room to roam and ‘here’s one about you’.[32]

 

***

 

the girl with the rouge,

unkissed lips, pulled her skirt

half an inch too high

new breasts bulging

through a Minnie Mouse t-shirt.

 

***

 

Mother lay in the bath

squeezing hard scarred nipples

that hung from empty breasts.

 

***

 

I, and all mothers, merely a

 

                        figure at a bus stop,

          an audience for the bus’s arrival.[33]

 

Waiting equates to emptiness. Then, I am the bus, perfunctory, carrying her along to the terminal. Is pregnancy really the ideal female state of existence? Buses are not synonymous with paradise. Once I was swollen in bliss; she, squished, stuck, controlled, confined within cushioned warmth; not on a big old bus, being jerked around like a pea in a pot.

 

‘What are you doing outside my body?’,

 

(italics are useful for out of body experiences), Gluck voices my horror. Physical separation resulting from her birth told through rapid enjambment;

 

          the daughter’s body

          doesn’t exist, except

          as a branch of the mother’s body

          that needs to be

reattached at any cost.[34]

 

I disagree. The loss of a branch to a tree is inconsequential.

 

The truth is that my heart burst through my torso

and lay raw, naked before me, unattached, beating an alien rhythm;

 the gaping hole in my chest, incompatible with human life.

 

The separation of two beings at childbirth ‘unbearable’, so too was my daughter’s changing body;

 

                           her beauty

          was unbearable: she remembers this. [35]

 

A perfect image, no longer only to my eyes, but with

 

so many eyes

watching from between blades

of new grass[36]

 

And she sleepwalked through the meadow’s blades, that swayed in a conspiratorial breeze; I watched on, powerless. Eavan Boland, in ‘The Pomegranate’, surrenders her to this inevitability; ‘The legend will be hers as well as mine’, knowing I ‘could warn’ my daughter of her predictable fate but she knows, and I knew, it was ‘inescapable’. [37] In ‘Persephone the Wanderer’, Gluck has my daughter

 

          no longer

          singing her maidenly songs.

          about her mother’s

          beauty and fecundity.[38]

 

And she wandered while she sang the ‘Song of the earth’ (I can’t recall the lyrics) succumbing to natural forces.[39] Deryn Rees-Jones, in ‘Persephone’, describes her desire for self as ‘love’s work’- but love is too big a word here- and ‘the pull of the weather’, powers beyond the human psyche responsible for her leaving.[40] Gluck claims she was ‘taken’ and Alison Townsend echoes this as she writes of adolescent girls ‘entranced with spell’, ‘sleepwalking’ their way to sexual and conscious awakening;

 

          and there is nothing

          not one thing

you can do or say

to wake her. [41][42]

 

Relentless as nature, these efficient short sentences, hypnotic and undemanding in rhythm, reinforce the inevitability of rite of passage; the independence sought by my daughter, feared but accepted, by I, who also once sleepwalked.

 

In Demeter to Persephone, I insist, ‘Get in the car’; a command that confirms my wrath yet also my need to cocoon her still.[43] But my wandering daughter’s return brought back a new being, ‘stained with red juice’ and ‘not what is called a girl’ although she still looked like one to me.[44]

 

***

 

And how can the mother feel anything other than rejection as her daughter, created in her image, develops ‘matrophobia’, desperate to become individual and separate from her, fearing any maternal resemblance?[45]

 

***

 

 ‘I remember when you didn’t exist’.

 

          I think I can remember

          being dead.[46]

 

But everything (EVERYTHING) happened so quickly;

 

          She put out her hand and pulled down

          the French sound for apple and

          the noise of stone and the proof

          that even in the place of death,

          at the heart of legend, in the midst

          of rocks full of unshed tears

          ready to be diamonds by the time

          the story was told, a child can be

hungry.[47]      

 

Here the tenses change the seasons, as she descends, meandering through eras of time, gathering pace through these tumbling sentences, landing in her own immediate and present needs.

 

***

 

Gluck blurts out the final taboo;

 

          Persephone is having sex in hell.[48]

 

The physical and sexual awakening complete; the severance, irreversible.

 

***

 

Light returns the girl.

She won’t ask,

did he make the first move?

Or did she?

The latter unthinkable.

 

She’d rather she’d been raped.

 

 

Jessie Greengrass wrote it plain and bold;

I find myself wondering if my mother felt as I do…. the overwhelming fear of fucking up that having children brings… and with it the attendant agonising understanding that what success looks like is being left behind- but what is the alternative?[49]

 

What was I to do with

 

disbelief,                           horror,                    rejection,

 

but mourn?

 

***

 

She walks behind me, five paces.

I slow down until we are aligned.

She stares forwards and walks in haste,

until she is five paces ahead.

I know to stay behind.

 

***

 

When a baby is expelled at birth it spends the rest of its life fighting to regain that connection, the amniotic bliss of sharing the mother’s body. Is this truly the most important moment in any relationship? In life? The ultimate safe house; the ultimate pleasure. Adrienne Rich confessed, ‘I remember lying in bed next to my husband, half dreaming, half believing, that the body close against mine was my mother’s…. Perhaps all sexual or intimate physical contact brings us back to that first body’.[50] And from the moment of birth, the process of dying begins.

 

Mothers are constantly repeating themselves.

 

‘Motherhood and maidenhood are two phases of a woman’s life, endlessly repeating. To recognise one’s participation in this ongoing pattern is to be given access to a kind of immortality’.[51] A woman’s fate is as certain as the changing seasons, the persistent turning of time. The seasons of womanhood are explored through the Persephone/ Demeter myth using seasonal allegory. The blossoming springtime of adolescence, the fruitful summer of childbearing, the tumultuous autumn of mothering, the bitter winter of barrenness and old age. Gluck’s short stanzas in ‘Persephone the Wanderer’, emulating the constant quick ticks of time as it punctuates the story. Seasons change from spring to winter, winter to spring as Zeus declares ‘in a short time you will be here again’, confirming that the seasons are not long-lasting, constantly shifting from one to the other.[52]

 

Women are never at peace.

 

Similarly in Demeter to Persephone, the poem ends with ‘and then it was spring’, as if winter is just short enough to maintain hope.[53] In The Pomegranate, Boland suggests of the myth that one can ‘enter it anywhere’, as wherever you join, the story will have a place for you.[54] And it’s true. Persephone becomes Demeter, who births Persephone, who becomes Demeter, who births Persephone.

 

***

 

Writing is a cyclical creative process where awareness stirs thoughts that churn, embed and incubate within the mind; there is pleasure, control and autonomy to be found in the nurturing process. When the act of writing makes tangible the creation, it no longer belongs to the writer. ‘And then the poem is finished, and at that moment, instantly detached: it becomes what it first was perceived to be, a thing always in existence… And the poet from that point, isn’t a poet anymore, simply one who wishes to be one’.[55] External influences change words. ‘We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are’.[56] Whatever I write is changed by the ‘I’s of others. And then I have to start again.

 

***

 

At what point did I stop being I, Persephone? Or am I still I, Persephone because I am still a daughter? Must I always remain I, Demeter? Can I be both? I often wondered why there was such significant displacement of self in motherhood, but the myth comforts. What happens when the time passes, the seasons change and two distinct ‘I’s emerge and reunite? What does that look like?

 

***

 

We curl together on the sofa, limbs entwined, her large thighs crushing mine, but I won’t move her. I wish I knew the exact moment in time that she outgrew me. We are watching Brave, a Disney movie about a wayward princess who rejects her mother’s wishes. Princess and queen separate temporarily as daughter leaves home, her mother angry and anguished. But time passes and distance provides clarity, and in the end they reunite. The queen acknowledges the daughter’s need for rebellion and the pain of their subsequent separation. The princess finds respect, and a deep longing for the strength of her mother’s ferocious love and guidance. Whilst apart, both characters evolve for the better, in the end uniting as stronger women, humbled by the temporary severance, to live happily ever after.

 

***

There came a point when I began to reclaim my body. A moment when I began to feel separate from my children. After years of pregnancy, breastfeeding, serving, teaching, loving, I began to feel that separateness as liberation, a return to self, but not a self I’ve been before. How do I write about my joy of separating from my children without sounding selfish? And can I ever be anything other than I, Persephone or I, Demeter?  Can my body ever be more than the sum of its reproductive years?

 

Consumed with yearning for her daughter, Iambe understood and made plenty of jokes and jests and made [Demeter] smile with kindly heart, and ever afterward she continues to delight her spirit.[57]

 

Or rather;

 

Baubo was called…. She cheered up [Demeter] with a lascivious dance in which she bared her breasts and her vulva. And she told stories. The sort that women tell.[58]

 

A warm welcome to, Baubo; the mischievous and carefree, ‘bawdy and sexually liberated’ old(er) woman who defies the patriarch and confines of the female body, shuns conformity, shame and regret.[59] A powerful ‘I’ who appears briefly within the myth, yet literature does not truly honour her; yet. Baubo represents female empowerment; a woman beyond her childrearing days who does not mourn the death of her fertility but reclaims her body for pleasure and joy. Baubo consoles and distracts Demeter from her consuming loss, reminding her that there is life beyond maternity, a life of power, female friendship and wisdom in which women are not slaves to their mothers or slaves to their daughters, free of the spells cast by wombs.

My sixteen-year-old daughter hates me right now. I told her she is changing; as she should. I told her I am changing too; as I should. I told her we’d reunite one day soon; two ‘I’s together, we’d create a new chapter for the myth.

erhaps eventually, time heals rifts as memories fall away, allowing for a new ‘I’ to emerge, an ‘I’ beyond Persephone and Demeter, although they remain part of the psyche.

 

***

 

We are only ever truly free

twice in our lives;

in childhood and old age;

when memory is absent.

 

***

 

I am interested in writing memoir but I feel like such an unreliable witness to my own life. And anyway, ‘we cannot rely on words to convey to another person what it feels like to be ourselves’.[60] I’m perplexed by the art of writing. Who is my ‘I’ and must it always be shifting, changing like the seasons, evolving with time? I try to catch my thoughts but they meander into big black holes. If I leave them long enough, they come back when they are ready… but I’m never certain of that.

 

***

 

I refuse to inhabit just two characters. I want more. There lies the problem. ‘I’ am a multitude. I make no apologies for wandering off the beaten track.

​

​

​

​

​

 

[1] Sylvia Plath, ‘Two Sisters of Persephone’, <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=27203> [accessed 3 April 2020].

[2] Edited by Christine Downing, The Long Journey Home, (Massachusetts: Shambhala Publications, 1994), p. 1.

[3] Ibid., p. 1.

[4] Nancy J. Chodorow Ph.D., Reflections on The Reproduction of Mothering- Twenty Years Later, (San Francisco: The Analytic Press, 1999), p. 338.

[5] Ibid., p. 340.

[6] Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born, (New York: Norton, 1995), p. 220.

[7] Rich, Of Woman Born, p. 226.

[8] Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies, (USA: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 15.

[9] Rich, Of Woman Born, p. 228.

[10] Ibid., p. 227.

[11] Ibid., p. 230.

[12] Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John, (London: Vintage, 1997), p. 25.

[13] Ibid., p. 27.

[14] Ibid., p. 27.

[15] Alicia Ostriker, ‘Demeter to Persephone’, < https://poets.org/book/book-seventy> [accessed 3 April 2020].

[16] Alice Townsend, ‘Persephone at the Mall’, < https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/persephone-at-the-mall/> [accessed 3 April 2020].

[17] Louise Gluck, ‘A Myth of Innocence’, < https://poets.org/poem/myth-innocence> [accessed 3 April 2020].

[18] Louise Gluck, ‘Persephone the Wanderer’, < https://poets.org/poem/persephone-wanderer?page=1> [accessed 3 April 2020].

[19] Louise Gluck, ‘A Myth of Devotion’, < https://poets.org/poem/myth-devotion> [accessed 3 April 2020].

[20] Ibid.

[21] Gluck, ‘Persephone the Wanderer’.

[22] Rita Dove, ‘Persephone Falling’, < https://poets.org/poem/persephone-falling> [accessed 3 April 2020].

[23] Gluck, ‘A Myth of Innocence’.

[24] Gluck, ‘Persephone the Wanderer’.

[25] Louise Gluck, ‘Blue Rotunda’, Averno (New York: Carcenet, 2006), p. 54.

[26] Jessie Greengrass, ‘The Most Selfish Choice’, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/08/20/the-most-selfish-choice/

[27] Gluck, ‘Persephone the Wanderer’.

[28] Jessie Greengrass, Sight, (Croydon: John Murray, 2019), p. 30.

[29] Ibid., p. 31.

[30] Gluck, ‘Persephone the Wanderer’.

 

[31] Gluck, ‘Persephone the Wanderer’.

[32] Reena Sastri, Louise Gluck’s ‘I’ (USA: PMLA, 2014), p. 5.

[33] Gluck, ‘Persephone the Wanderer’.

[34] Gluck, ‘Persephone the Wanderer’.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Townsend, ‘Persephone at the Mall’.

[37] Eavan Boland, ‘The Pomegranate’, < https://poets.org/poem/pomegranate> [accessed 3 April 2020].

[38] Gluck, ‘Persephone the Wanderer’.

[39] Ibid.

[40] Deryn Rees Jones, ‘Persephone’, < https://poetryarchive.org/poem/persephone/> [accessed 3 April 2020].

[41] Gluck, ‘Persephone the Wanderer’.

[42] Townsend, ‘Persephone at the Mall’.

[43] Ostriker, ‘Demeter to Persephone’.

[44] Gluck, ‘Persephone the Wanderer’.

[45] Rich, Of Woman Born, p. 235.

[46] Gluck, ‘Persephone the Wanderer’.

[47] Boland, ‘The Pomegranate’.

[48] Gluck, ‘Persephone the Wanderer’.

[49] Greengrass, Sight, p. 127.

[50] Rich, Of Woman Born, p. 243.

[51] Downing, The Long Journey Home, p. 224.

[52] Gluck, ‘Persephone the Wanderer’.

[53] Ostriker, ‘Demeter to Persephone’.

[54] Boland, ‘The Pomegranate’.

[55] Louise Gluck, Proofs and Theories (London: Carcanet, 1999), p.16.

[56] Anias Nin, < https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/7190.Ana_s_Nin> [accessed 3 April 2020].

[57] Downing, The Long Journey Home, p. 31.

[58] Ibid., p. 31.

[59] Wikipedia, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baubo> [accessed 5 April 2020].

[60] Mark, Doty, The Art of Description (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2010), p.10.