BA in English literature. She subsequently gained
an MA from Georgetown University and an ABD
from Columbia University. She has held teaching
positions at Middlebury College, Vermont, and
Northeastern Illinois University, where she was
poet in residence. As of 2009, she was teaching in
the MFA Writing Program at Florida Atlantic
University in Boca Raton, where she holds the
Mary Blossom Lee Endowed Chair in Creative
Writing. She divides her time between Florida
and Connecticut.
Mitchell has won many awards for her poetry,
including fellowships from the National Endow-
ment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation
(1992), and the Lannan Foundation (1992). She is
the author of three poetry collections:The Water
Inside the Water(1983), which centers on the mys-
teries of consciousness and existence; Rapture
(1992), which focuses on finding the extraordinary
within the commonplace; and Erotikon (2000),
which explores sensuality and erotic experience.
These collections were all published by Harper
Collins.Rapturewas awarded the Kingsley Tufts
Poetry Award in 1993 and was a National Book
Award finalist.
Mitchell’s poems have been published in liter-
ary reviews and magazines, including theNew
Yorker,Atlantic Monthly,American Poetry Review,
New Republic,andParis Review. Her poems have
also been included in five volumes ofThe Best
American Poetryand two Pushcart Prize volumes.
She received Ploughshare’s Denise and Mel Cohen
Awardin1992.
Mitchell is the translator of ‘‘Canto 21’’ and
‘‘Canto 22’’ of Dante’sInferno,inVersions of the
Inferno,editedbyDanielHalpern(EccoPress,
1993).
Commenting on her creative process (in a
personal email communication with the author),
Mitchell writes:
There is a line in ‘‘Night Music’’ (Rapture)where
the speaker talks of Chaucer, Coleridge, and
Chekhov and says: ‘‘Last night they awakened
me/ with their listening.’’ The creative process for
me is a process of listening, hearing what at first
might not sound like a poem, being alert, being
an antenna. The French poet Vale ́ry wrote: ‘‘The
ear speaks, the mouth listens.’’ I’ve always loved
that.
Mitchell adds, ‘‘Perhaps listening is so impor-
tant to me because I love music. I studied piano,
starting when I was seven, and dance, starting a
year or two later.’’
Asked about her influences, Mitchell reported
composers come to mind first: Barto ́k, the late
Beethoven quartets, and Elliott Carter. She writes
(in the same email communication with the author):
‘‘In Raptureand ErotikonIbegantobringin
snatches of other languages as much for the music
as for the sense.’’Poem Text
At night the dead come down to the river to
drink.
They unburden themselves of their fears,
their worries for us. They take out the old
photographs.
They pat the lines in our hands and tell our
futures,
which are cracked and yellow. 5
Some dead find their way to our houses.
They go up to the attics.
They read the letters they sent us, insatiable
for signs of their love.
They tell each other stories. 10
They make so much noise
they wake us
as they did when we were children and they
stayed up
drinking all night in the kitchen.Poem Summary
Lines 1–7
‘‘The Dead’’ describes an episode in the afterlife of
souls of people who once lived on earth but who
are now dead. Shown interacting with the living,
thedeadareportrayedashavingasbusyand
active a life on earth as those who are still alive.
Line 1 describes the habit of the dead of coming
to the river to drink at night. The image is unusual
as it is not expected thatdead people need to eat or
drink as they do not have earthly bodies to sustain.
The river referred to may be the river Lethe or
the river Styx of ancient Greek mythology. The
Lethe was one of the rivers of Hades, the under-
world and abode of the dead. The ancient Greeks
believed that the newly dead drank from this river to
enable them to forget their lives on earth. The river
Styx separated the world of the living, the upper
world, from the world of the dead, the underworld.
Line 2 describes the dead as offloading their
fears and worries for their loved ones who are still
living. It is not made explicit how they do this, but
perhaps it is by talking to one another andThe Dead