MOTHER LOVE: SUMMARY

Published during Rita Doves tenure as poet laureate, Mother Love shows her grace and
skill as a poet. The title announces the subject clearly, but the poems have a range of
emotion and observation that surprises the reader continually. The figures behind the
poems are Persephone and Demeter, a daughter and mother who learn to be together and
apart. Real places and other mothers and daughters blend with the mythic. Stylistically, the
poems have a range, but most of them are sonnetsnot traditional sonnets, but sonnets
neverthelessand the concluding section is a crown of sonnets associating Demeter and
Persephone with a womans relationship with the earth that mirrors her, and with the whole
mother-daughter cycle of love and loss. The poet herself slips into the cycle too, as
another face of woman. Dove comments in her introduction that The Demeter/
Persephone cycle of betrayal and regeneration is ideally suited for this [sonnet] form since
all threemother-goddess, daughter-consort, and poetare struggling to sing in their
chains.

The first poem, Heroes, although not a sonnet, is a nightmarish representation of a

womans mixed feelings of desperation, responsibility, and guilt. It reads, in fact, like a bad
dreamthe person addressed as you picks a poppy in the field and asks at a nearby
house for a jar of water to preserve it, but the woman of the house starts/ screaming:
youve picked the last poppy/ in her miserable garden . . . The main character addressed
as you starts apologizing, then hits the woman, who falls and strikes her head. The thief
has to flee, terrified and ashamed, with the stolen flower. Oh why/ did you pick that idiot
flower? The poem concludes. Because it was the last one/ and you knew/ it was going to
die.

The subjects of the book converge in this dreamlike parable: Persephone is picking
flowers when abducted, the poet is in some ways a thief, and a womans life of mothering
and being mothered is fraught with the kind of anxiety that this poem evokes-terror of
harming instead of nurturing, of being blamed for destruction when the intent was to
preserve. The poem suggests that a woman cannot avoid her fate as a woman, which is to
be nurturer and destroyer.

The power in these poems is in the blend of reality and myth; the sonnet Missing is a
prime example. The speaker is a daughter who is missing and has various identities:
Persephone and any missing daughter (and broadly, any daughter) who at some point in
her life is missing to her mother. She comments that nothing marked my last/ known
whereabouts, not a single glistening petal. She is returned and watches her mothers
reception of her explanations: It seems almost as though the speaker is mother and
daughter at once, the missing and the one who misses. The poem pulls subtle strings in its
analysis of the mother-daughter relationship.

Persephone Abducted is also a sonnet, this time describing the abduction of the daughter
from an ambiguous point of view, the we who may represent the point of view of those
left. The poem explores the grief of the mother who cannot fathom her loss. The standard
answers for grief do not apply in real cases: Some say theres nourishment for pain,/ and
call it Philosophy. However, that is for the birds, who are, in fact, the birds of preyhawk
and vulture. There is no answer to loss except endurance and acceptance of fate.

The loss of Persephone and Demeters rage and grief blur with other stories of mothers
and daughters, evoking all daughters departures, whether voluntary or involuntary,
temporary or permanent. Reading the collection is painful because mother-love is so

intermingled with mother-losswhether it is the child or the mother who is removedthat

its brief patches of sunlight and joy seem few. Statistic: The Witness seems to blend
Persephones story with that of a young woman abducted. The speaker begins No matter
where I turn, she is there/ screaming. The speaker tries various means of forgetting, but
cannotthe tiniest details of the abduction obsess her and will not pass from her mind.
The speaker cannot forget, and so she turns to the earththe ultimate mother whose
green oblivion will finally obliterate what she has seen. As in other poems, the
contemporary is superimposed on the mythicmother and Mother Earth, the abducted
child with Persephonein order to provide an emotional impression of the terrible fragility
of motherhood.

The combination of mythic and ordinary is clearest perhaps in The Bistro Styx, a clever
poem in five eccentrically rhyming sonnets which details a luncheon meeting between a
mother, the speaker, and her blighted child, who has given up her own life to be a muse
to her lover, an artist. The daughter gives details of her life in what her mother sees as
Hades and misses her mothers intimate question about her happiness because she is
biting into the starry rose of a figher version of the fatal pomegranate that Persephone
tasted, binding her to Pluto for the winter months. This daughter has clearly made her
choice; all her mother can do is resign herself. The poem is highly specific and evocative
in its description of restaurant and conversationit takes the title to remind the reader of
the mythic grounding.

Doves poems in this collection are more open and allusive than in some others and
sometimes defy explication, but they communicate with extraordinary clarity to the
intuition. The use of the sonnet form is both appropriate and teasing. The poems
foreground Doves lifelong theme of womans experience as mother and daughter. Some
of the poems by their evocative detail reflect her commitment to African American issues,
but for the most part the themes of Mother Love are universal.