Here, hunger and thirst are not merely the literal
hunger for food and thirst for water that sustain
human beings on earth. The hunger and thirst felt
by the dead is a spiritual and emotional need to
continue to experience the love that they felt for
friends and relatives while they were still on earth.
If the river is understood to be the Lethe, then,
in this poem as in Greek mythology, it may be
understood metaphorically to stand for the process
of the soul’s forgetting of its earthly life. This inter-
pretation may be reinforced by the poet’s use of the
wordattic. Used as a noun, the word refers to the
top story of a house, traditionally used for storage
of family heirlooms. In the poem, the word can be
taken literally to express the dead people’s habit of
invading the attics of their loved ones on earth.
However, employed as an adjective,atticmeans
pertaining to or characteristic of Greece or Athens,
and is typically used in connection with ancient
Greece. Thus the poet’s choice of the word conveys
a less literal meaning, inviting readers to bring to
mind the mythology of ancient Greece.
Conversational Style
‘‘The Dead’’ is written in a casual and conversa-
tional style, approaching prose, that contrasts
with its weighty subject matter of the afterlife.
For those who are familiar with the possible influ-
ences on the poem of Dante’sDivine Comedyand
Greek mythology, this contrast is the more strik-
ing. The juxtaposition of weighty subject and con-
versational style has the effect of reinforcing the
poem’s meaning. The poem is about the everyday
and mundane lives of the dead and how their
existence is not so different from that of the living.
Instead, the two worlds are intimately connected,
in ways of which the living may be unaware,
except when they are rudely awakened by the
dead’s raucous activities.
By using an everyday conversational style, the
poet suggests that death is not something distant
and alien but an intrinsic part of everyone’s lives.
Historical Context
Dante’sDivine Comedy
‘‘The Dead’’ is reminiscent of the second section of
Dante’s epic poem, theDivine Comedy, called in
EnglishPurgatory(Italian:Purgatorio). TheDivine
Comedyis an allegorical description of the Chris-
tian afterlife in which the poet is guided around
Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Heaven
(Paradiso). An allegory is a representation of an
abstract or spiritual meaning through concrete or
material forms. The ancient Roman poet Virgil is
Dante’s guide through Hell and Purgatory, while
Beatrice, a woman whom Dante loved, is his guide
in Heaven.
InPurgatory, Dante encounters souls that are
going through a purification process to make them
ready for Heaven. Throughout thePurgatoryand
(Inferno, various shades (spirits of the dead) ask
Dante to tell their stories on his return to earth.
They appear to want to attain a kind of immortal-
ity through storytelling. In a similar way, the dead
of Mitchell’s poem tell stories of the living, feeding
their connection with people on earth and seeming
to gain spiritual nourishment thereby.Greek Mythology and Belief
In the mythology of ancient Greece (around 1100 –
146 B.C.), after a person died on earth, they would
enter the underworld or Hades, the abode of the
dead (Hades was also the name of the god of
the underworld). The dead person was rowed by
the ferryman Charon across the river Styx, one
of the five rivers of Hades, which formed the boun-
dary between the upper world of the living and the
underworld. The five rivers of Hades, and their
symbolic meanings, were Acheron, the river of sor-
row or woe; Cocytus, the river of lamentation;
Phlegethon, the river of fire; Lethe, the river of
forgetting or oblivion; and Styx, the river of hate.
The first region of Hades comprises the Fields
of Asphodel, a region where souls that were neither
extremely good nor extremely evil rested. Robert
Graves noted inThe Greek Mythsthat here, the
shades of heroes wandered among the lesser spirits,
who twittered like bats. Their one delight was liba-
tions (drink offerings) of blood offered to them in
the world of the living. This awakened in them for a
time the sensations of humanity. Graves’s descrip-
tion recalls the dead of Mitchell’s poem, with their
chatter and insatiable thirst for earthly experience
and emotions.
Beyond the Fields of Asphodel was the Palace
of Hades and his consort Persephone. Near the
Palace were two pools: the pool of Lethe, where
the common ghosts flocked to drink, and Mnemo-
syne, the pool of memory, where the initiates of the
Mysteries (rituals and secret rites connected with
the religious traditions of ancient Greece and
Rome) drank instead. The ancient Greeks believed
in reincarnation, the rebirth of a soul in another
body. Therefore, lesser souls were thought to forgetThe Dead