Mother Love by Rita Dove

First published: 1993; collected in Mother Love, 1995

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

The title poem “Mother Love” appears in the second of seven sections of Rita Dove’s collection Mother Love. Like all the poems in the collection, “Mother Love” examines a dramatic story from Greek mythology, the story of Demeter, goddess of grain and agriculture, and her beautiful daughter Persephone. It is, in Dove’s words, “a tale of a violated world,” simultaneously ancient and modern.

A summary of the myth is important for this poem. With almost no witnesses and with the permission of her father Zeus, the supreme Olympian deity, Persephone has been abducted and raped by Hades, the ruler of the underworld and her uncle, who subsequently makes her his queen. Unable to find her daughter, an angry and inconsolable Demeter wanders among mortals, disguised as an elderly woman. She comes to Eleusis, where she meets the four lovely daughters of Celeus, king of Eleusis, and his wife Metaneira. Demeter, at Metaneira’s urging, becomes nurse to the couple’s only son, the infant Demophoön. Determined to make the boy immortal, each night Demeter secretly places him in the fire. One night Metaneira discovers this and screams in terror, thus thwarting Demeter’s plans. An angry, radiant goddess reveals herself and disappears, but not before ordering the people of Eleusis to build a temple and altar in her honor and promising to teach them rites that became known as the Eleusinian Mysteries.

It is the episode of Demeter and the young son of Celeus and Metaneira that Dove addresses in the poem “Mother Love” and that precedes the rest of the myth: Still inconsolable, Demeter lets the crops die and refuses solace from the other Olympian gods and goddesses. Eventually Zeus agrees to return Persephone, but because she has eaten pomegranate seeds offered by Hades, she must spend fall and winter with her husband and spring and summer with her mother, thus ensuring the seasons, agriculture, and partial consolations.

Demeter’s first-person voice dominates the poem, which is divided into two stanzas of twelve and sixteen lines. These twenty-eight lines suggest a subtle doubling of the traditional fourteen lines of a sonnet, a form that preoccupies Dove throughout the collection. The poem is, in fact, a sort of double mothering and a double mourning. In the three sentences that make up the first stanza, Demeter reflects on maternal instincts that combine deep comforts and fears. Tracing in her mind the nurture and natural maturation of children, she voices parents’ universal worries as their children “rise, primed/ for Love or Glory” and as their daughters’ youthful myopia blinds them to advancing perils.

The poet then makes a shift between the two stanzas, moving from generalizations to specifics. Demeter recalls “this kind woman” (Metaneira), “her bouquet of daughters,” and her young son. Demeter will not stop those daughters from being scattered and taken in marriage, but she decides to save the “noisy and ordinary” boy who, if “cured to perfection,” could become immortal. This attempt is not simple. She wants to make Demophoön invulnerable, but Metaneira’s terrified screams end all that and force Demeter to remember her own screams and her vulnerable, lost daughter. She thus answers the rhetorical question with which she begins the poem: “Who can forget the attitude of mothering?”

Forms and Devices

In drawing from mythology for this poem’s structure and themes, Dove joins a long line of writers, artists, musicians, and choreographers. Her awareness of this shows throughout the collection Mother Love in epigraphs taken from works by writers such as H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Muriel Rukeyser, James Hillman, Jamaica Kincaid, John Milton, Kadia Molodowsky, and even Mother Goose. It shows more deeply in her combined preoccupation with mythology and the sonnet form, a combination she acknowledges as an “homage” and “counterpoint” to Die Sonette an Orpheus (1923; Sonnets to Orpheus, 1923) by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

“Mother Love,” like many of the collection’s poems, reflects no ordinary approach to traditional sonnet forms with their set meters, rhyme schemes, and stanza lengths. Still, the sonnet form is a stubborn and surprising presence in the poem. For example, unlike the final two rhyming lines (a couplet) with which any Shakespearean or English sonnet ends, Dove begins “Mother Love” with a couplet (rhyming “mothering” with “bothering”) that does not create a closure. The second line of the couplet uses enjambment (no end-stop) to continue directly on to subsequent lines and irregular end rhymes throughout the two stanzas. (The second stanza, for instance, is filled with end and internal rhymes of “er” and “ur” syllables.) Furthermore, the poet reverses and doubles the stanza patterns of a Petrarchan or Italian sonnet, which begins with an eight-line stanza (an octet) and concludes with six lines (a sestet). “Mother Love” thus begins with a twelve-line stanza and concludes with sixteen lines. These sonnet cues and reversals are powerful. It is as if, like Demeter’s daughter, the revered sonnet forms have been taken underground. Like Demeter’s response to Demophoön, the absence of the primary form heightens the reader’s awareness of that form and its replacement.

Despite such changes, Dove follows the thematic development scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet. “Mother Love” begins with an exposition of the theme, then elaborates on that theme. The poet then creates the traditional turn between the two stanzas by shifting to a specific example of the theme before moving, in the final two lines, to the theme’s conclusion. The reader is certainly more conscious of the poem’s voice and language than its nuanced structure. Dove achieves this by giving Demeter highly accessible language and informal, conversational speech rhythms; equally important, each of her six sentences is a natural breath unit. As a result, the reader, drawn effortlessly into Demeter’s voice, focuses on the unfolding narrative and the poet’s arresting images and diction.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. XCI, May 1, 1995, p. 1547.

The Christian Science Monitor. September 7, 1995, p. 13.

Ebony. L, May, 1995, p. 20.

Essence. XXVI, September, 1995, p. 73.

The New York Times Book Review. C, September 17, 1995, p. 41.

The New Yorker. LXXI, May 15, 1995, p. 90.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLII, March 27, 1995, p. 79.

The Virginia Quarterly Review. LXXI, Autumn, 1995, p. SS136.

The Washington Post Book World. XXV, July 30, 1995, p. 8.

Writer. CVIII, January, 1995, p. 14.