Poetry for Students, Volume 31

Orpheus’s four mythic themes, first, he is some-
times accounted as the (human) inventor of
song and is said to have been able to use song
to change the course of rivers, draw trees and
rocks to him, and make wild animals come to
him in gentle submission. Second, Orpheus was
a crew member of the shipArgoin the epic
story of Jason, and he prevented the Sirens
(wicked women of the water) from luring the
ship to destruction with their seductive song by
outsinging them. Third, when his wife, Eury-
dice, was killed by the bite of a serpent on their
wedding day, Orpheus journeyed to the under-
world and used his song to persuade the gods
Hades and Persephone to allow him to lead her
back to earth and life. In the best-known ver-
sions of this story, he fails by anxiously looking
back for her at the last moment before reemerg-
ing into the living world, only to see her slip
back into the world of the dead; in the earliest
versions, on the other hand, he seems to have
successfully resurrected her. Last, while mourn-
ing for Eurydice in the wild forest, Orpheus
encounters a group of maenads (frenzied wor-
shippers of Dionysus) who mistake him for an

animal and tear him to pieces in a ritual sacri-

fice, but even after his death, Orpheus’s head

continues to sing.

The best-known ancient account of Orpheus

occurs in the Roman poet Ovid’sMetamorpho-

ses, which features tales of transformations. In

the tenth book, Ovid describes Orpheus calling

trees to him by song to create a grove, giving a

lengthy catalog (lines 86–105) of the different

tree species that answer his call. Due to the clas-

sical cast of the basic education she received

before World War II, Levertov probably had a

general familiarity with Orpheus from direct

encounters with ancient poetry. However, she

also read W. K. C. Guthrie’s study of the ancient

Orphic tradition,Orpheus and Greek Religion,

and this book no doubt conditioned her presen-

tation of Orpheus in the poem, for instance in

her separation of the esoteric (lines 54–58) and

poetic (lines 144–49) traditions about Orpheus.

Katabasis (Descent to the Underworld)

Katabasis (literally, ‘‘going downward’’) is a

theme of Greek poetry in which a hero descends

to the underworld and returns transformed or

Tree(Image copyright Alexander Kalina, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)

A Tree Telling of Orpheus