Grief of a Greek Hero – Emily Baker

Grief of a Greek Hero – George Frederic Watts (1817-190)

I wonder what he felt

When he turned around, 

The quiet gasp of breath, the– 

knowing. 

To hold a lover in your arms

To sing a song, to bear the weight 

Of your world, and lose it 

In a heartbeat. 

There is something desperate,

In the grasping–

Maybe he could pull her back

With him, to life, home.

Maybe he might be the one

To turn the tale, to change her fate.

What is a man without love?

Who is this man, without a song? 

He must have wondered, 

Was his melody enough? 

The silence that must have rung

The final note he uttered

A song that could not heal

A love lost, the song ended, 

How does it feel, to lose– 

The world.

This poem, which I have titled after the painting that inspired it, “Grief of a Greek Hero”, is a piece questioning Orpheus’s feelings directly after sending his lover, Eurydice, back to the underworld. Orpheus, the son of a muse, a singer, and a poet, falls in love with the beautiful nymph Eurydice. The couple is not together for long, as Eurydice gets bitten by a viper and dies on their wedding night. Orpheus, not content with being separated from his love, decides to go to the underworld to try and bring her back. Long story short, Hades makes a deal with Orpheus-if he can walk out of the underworld without looking back to see if Eurydice is behind him-she is free to go, but if he looks-she gets sent back to the underworld, forever. A simple exercise in trust and faith in his love. The story ends with Orpheus nearly (and in some tales, fully) making it out-but at the last second, he looks-only to see that Eurydice WAS behind him, and sends her back to the underworld.

This painting depicts the moment that Orpheus looks, realizing he has doomed his love and trying to reach for her before she is pulled away. I was heavily inspired by Natasha Trethewey’s “Photograph of a Bawd Drinking Raleigh Rye” as well as her “Vignette.” The nature of questioning the subject in the painting itself, pointing towards action and movement, and posing the reader to question what the characters might be thinking or feeling as they are trapped in time were key points for me here. I tried to keep the theme of  the song, as music is typically a large theme to hold onto in art-as well as the fact that we as viewers cannot hear the song Orpheus is singing. As for wording, breaking where I did, etcetera-I just wanted it to read in a similar way to more lyrical pieces (again tying in that theme of the music). I think that breaks in lines for a breath or a calculated pause of speech can convey intense emotion-which I felt when looking at this painting, and wanted to try my best to convey in my response.