I am indebted to Robert Graves’s magisterial and comprehensive
The Greek Myths for much of the information in this series of poems.

A for Atalanta (Ἀταλάντη)

In this Olympic year, as athletes bear the flame away
from Greece to France, an alphabet of verses I begin
by lauding one so fleet of foot as easily to win
all races but her last. It’s true, she made the losers pay
a shocking price for failure, with the forfeit of their lives;
but, in a man’s world, Atalanta had a point to prove
as hunter, wrestler, runner. These, and not the arts of love,
are skills, she showed, by which an equal woman now survives.

So far, so good. Then Aphrodite’s apples turned her head,
the myth reverts to type, the runner-up’s obliged to wed.

They coupled in a precinct owned by Zeus: an act profane.
He morphed them into lions, and arranged this change of state
because, mistakenly he thought, two lions will not mate.

Against divine displeasure, human purposes are vain.

B for Bellerophon (Βελλεροφών)

Bellerophon, a killer on the run, is nonetheless
an innocent in this: he has not bodily abused
a queen who fell in love with him, whose ardour he refused.
Enraged, the woman tells the king a lie, and claims redress.

The husband sends him to her father with a letter, sealed.
‘The bearer tried to violate your daughter. May I ask
you to arrange for him some fail-safe suicidal task?’

Against the plot, divine assistance on the battlefield
is soon at hand: Athene (or Poseidon, some books say)
provides our man with bridled Pegasus, a horse with wings.
Decisive are the soldierly advantages this brings
when he has monsters, pirates, warlike Amazons to slay.

From these encounters he returns victorious each time.
At last the father learns the truth. He gives him, to atone,
another daughter and, to boot, succession to the throne.

Ambitious climbers court disaster, seeking still to climb.
What was he thinking when he took that final flying ride,
his destination Mount Olympus? He was doomed to fail.
A gadfly sent by Zeus stung Pegasus beneath the tail,
who hurled his rider earthward, where he wandered till he died.

Having triumphantly prevailed against extremest odds,
the hero should have banked his happiness, and settled down
with Philonoë’s beauty and the prospect of a crown.
No chance of that. ‘We don’t do happy endings,’ say the gods.

C for Calypso (Καλυψώ)

A dot on the horizon first; and then the keel and mast
of what had been a ship; and then a half-drowned sailor, cast
upon the shore, who staggered, fell down, gasping, puking brine.

I took him to my cave and care, and gave him food and wine
and, later, other comforts too. As in my arms he lay,
I whispered, ‘Immortality is yours if you will stay.’

And for a while he did. For seven years he shared my bed,
and often I renewed my offer. But he shook his head.

I knew I’d lost him when he took to squatting on the sand
and staring out to sea. Some woman in some other land
still filled his thoughts.

                                         Then Hermes came with orders from on high:
‘Release your prisoner.’ I had no choice but to comply.

He built his raft; I victualled it; he hauled it down the beach.
He’d made his mortal mind up, and his mind was out of reach.

D for Danaë (Δανάη)

Typology is everywhere in myth, we know.
I link a victim of incestuous abuse
who slept (and maybe really was asleep) with Zeus
with one who also knew how far a god could go.

A lowly maiden, she; while she, of royal rank,
by father’s orders languished in imprisonment.
One gave and one withheld her bodily consent.

How did divinity perform? The Greeks are frank:
Zeus ‘rudely forced’ Danaë as a shower of gold.
The outcome in both cases was a famous boy
with magic powers. But Christianity is coy:
the form the Holy Ghost assumed we are not told.

Suppose the women met in afterlife. Perhaps
they’d chat about how gods in bed compare with chaps.

E for Eurydice (Εὐρυδίκη)

For one who dwells in Hell, who once enjoyed the light of day,
to have the chance to hear him play under the sky again,
only, for a moment’s weakness, to have hope snatched away
(a weakness born of strength of love), there is no greater pain.

F for the Fates (Μοῖραι)

Our lives are spun on Clotho’s spindle; by Lachesis’ rod
they’re measured out; runt portion of the white-robed triune god,
Atropos (but the most appalling of the three), has shears
which snip the thread, however brief or lengthy, of our years.

Or so the story went. Old stuff, to spook the credulous.
Unspooked (we like to think), we spin the latest version thus:
no longer helpless, blind outworkings of the Fates’ commands,
we hold the spindle, rod and shears as booty in our hands.

G for the Gorgons (Γοργώνες)

When Perseus arrived, they were asleep,
around them rain-worn shapes of men and beasts
Medusa’s ugliness had turned to stone.
He studied her reflection in the shield
and made quick work: her head was in his hand,
the face down-pointing, from the sickle’s stroke,
and stuffed into a magic wallet. Then,
surprise: the heaving, headless trunk gave birth
to unlike twins — a horse and man — who cried,
as newborns will, at which the sisters woke
and saw the scene and howled for their revenge.
Wallet in hand, the executioner,
whose helmet rendered him invisible,
took flight on wingèd sandals through the air
and easily evaded their pursuit.

Changing to stone her victims at a glance:
what change in her who had been lovely once!

H for Heracles (Ἡρακλῆς) (Mr and Mrs)

The price they paid for her disastrously misplaced belief!
‘Just smear this mixture on his shirt,’ her violator said.
‘It’s guaranteed to keep your wanton husband chaste.’ Instead
it slowly tortured him to death. She killed herself for grief.

Immortal Heracles is raised to heaven in a cloud.
His mortal ghost roams Tartarus, amongst the twittering dead.
His last of many wives lies lifeless on their marriage bed.
He gains, at least in part, apotheosis; she, a shroud.

I for Icarus (Ἴκαρος)

He’d been received and honoured by his royal host,
but shifting is a king’s esteem; that time was past.
He must get out of Crete with Icarus, but how?
Impossible by sea; the ports were under guard.
He brooded on the problem; then conceived a plan.
He fashioned wings, two sets, of feathers, wax and thread.
They went by night along a secret upward way
until they came out at a cliff’s edge in the dawn.
He fixed the boy’s wings; then his own. He warned his son,
‘Don’t soar too high. The wax will melt. Nor swoop too low.
The feathers, wetted by the sea, will weigh you down.
I’ll set the course. You follow me. And do not stray.’

They launched, two paragliders, from the cliff. And flew.
The fishermen and ploughmen who looked up and stared
concluded they were gods, and turned to their affairs.

Riding the air, the boy forgot his father’s fears,
defied instructions and flew up toward the sun.
When Daedalus looked round, his Icarus had gone.
Scattered white feathers floated on the waves below.
He stooped and circled, searching, till the corpse appeared.
He reached. So cunning had his engineering been,
his wings held up the double freight of boy and man.

They landed on an island. Daedalus, distraught
and piteously lamenting, laid his son to rest.
He trod the air again and, as he flew, he cursed
the evil outcome which his maker’s hands had wrought.

J for Jason (Ἰάσων)

You pushed your luck. The woman by whose guile
you yoked two brazen-footed bulls,
protected by her lotion from their fiery breath,
then ploughed the field and sowed the serpent’s teeth;
the woman who by incantations and with sprigs of juniper
first soothed then sent to sleep the loathsome dragon of a thousand coils
so that you could unfasten from the oak tree, where it hung,
the golden fleece;
who braved the dangers of the homeward trip with you,
became the wife with whom you’d sworn
by all the gods on Mount Olympus to keep faith for ever;
who then bore you seven sons and seven daughters;
whom you divorced
and so enraged as to enact a terrible revenge:
that woman never died, but you were left to grieve
for late disasters self-inflicted,
sitting down in Corinth in old age
beneath the ship you’d captained, which
— Olympus’ retribution, surely —
suddenly tipped forward on its prow and crushed you.

Scorning a woman and the gods, you pushed your luck, and paid.

K for Kilhwych

The choice of alphabetic mythic characters from Greece was wide
until I came to K. Lean pickings here. Should I skip on to L?
I’m sorely tempted, till I’m rescued by the Celtic bards, who tell
how Kilhwych, hero of the Mabinogion, to gain his bride,
the comely Olwen, was (a bit like youthful Jason, see above)
required by Olwen’s dad to undertake such superhuman deeds
as yoking two unbroken bulls to clear a hill of thorns and weeds,
then — in one day — to seed the hill and reap its grain: a test of love
he passed on time with flying colours and obtained the lady’s hand.
What’s more, he had to find (more practical than Jason’s golden fleece)
a horn of plenty and a cauldron of regeneration: pots
to bring the couple riches (in sufficiency) and children (lots).
Indulge me, reader, in this swerve to ancient Wales from ancient Greece;
improbabilities like these are voyagers from land to land.

L for Leda (Λήδα), Pondering Yeats’s Sonnet

My thighs were loosening, in his account;
as if, after some struggle, I began
to overcome my terror of the swan
and please it in the role of willing mount.

My cunt was dry. The chafing made me bleed.
There was no feathered glory, no consent.
Its penis was its blood’s blunt instrument
and blood was all that issued from the deed.

The poet asks if I, the raped, put on
the knowledge with the power of the beast
while it was in me. Did I get the taste
for knowing what the creature had foreknown?

Had ever screams been strangled in his throat,
he would have had his answer as he wrote.

Leda and the Swan — W.B. Yeats

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push

The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

And how can body, laid in that white rush,

But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead.

                                        Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air,

Did she put on his knowledge with his power

Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

M for the Muses (Μοῦσαι)

We once were three. The trio since has tripled. We are nine:
a sisterhood of knowledge with a lineage divine.
In science and the arts we marry genius to skill;
without our aid the flute falls silent and the dance is still.
The writers who invoke us are such poets of first rank
as Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare; all have us to thank;
our breath has launched the ships and filled the sails of their verse.

Presumptuous competitors in song have come off worse:
those upstart girls we changed to jays — a bird that squawks, not sings;
the Sirens flightless (though still deadly) since we clipped their wings.
Yet strivers after beauty know our kindness in return;
we understand ‘the lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne’.
An hour of inspiration or a lifetime of regret?
The daughters of Mnemosyne we are; we don’t forget.

N for Narcissus (Νάρκισσος)

O for Orpheus (Ὀρφεύς)

Virgil’s Georgics, book 4, lines 450-527

Wanton Aristaeus had attempted to ravish Eurydice, wife of Orpheus. Misfortunes followed him thereafter. On the advice of his mother Cyrene, he visited the shape-shifting seer Proteus, whom he subdued despite the seer’s attempts at evasion, and compelled to reveal the cause of his woes.

The great Roman poet gives Persephone and Hades their Roman names.

… the seer, surrendering at last
to inspiration’s agonising force,
his rolling eyes ablaze with blue-grey light,
gnashing his teeth in grim and helpless rage,
opened his mouth to speak the judgement of the fates.
‘The anger of a god pursues you, for your crime is great.
The punishment you suffer is far less than you deserve.
Unhappy Orpheus has brought it on you, in his fury
that his wife was stolen from him by your lust.
Fleeing headlong on the riverbank, the poor doomed girl,
in desperation to escape you, failed to see
a giant water snake in long grass at her feet.
Her sisterhood of wood nymphs filled the mountaintops
with cries of sorrow. On the heights of Thrace
and by its rivers there was lamentation.
Orithyia, daughter of the king of Athens, wept.
Orpheus sought consolation for his aching heart
with music from his lyre. It was of you, Eurydice,
his own sweet wife, of you he sang along the lonely shore,
of you as day approached, of you as day departed.
  
He even ventured through the gorge of Taenarum,
past Pluto’s lofty gates, and crossed a terrifying murky grove,
until he reached the country of the dead, ruled by its fearful king:
the masters of that land, flint-hearted, are impervious to human prayers.
Moved by his song, up from the deepest settlements of Erebus
came insubstantial spirits, ghosts of those who live in darkness,
numbering as many thousands as the flocks of birds
that hide themselves among the leaves
when nightfall or a winter shower drives them from the mountains:
women and men, great heroes of the past, their lives now done,
young boys, unmarried girls
and sons placed on the funeral pyre before their parents’ eyes.
The marshes of the sluggish river Cocytus imprisoned them:
a landscape of black mud and ugly reeds;
beyond, the nine confining circles of the river Styx.
They listened.
What is more, the very house of Death, the lowest vaults of Hell,
the Furies with the purple snakes twined in their hair,
were spellbound by the music;
Cerberus stood still, his triple mouths agape;
the wind dropped, and the wheel of Ixion slowed down and stopped.

And now, as Orpheus retraced his steps,
avoiding every danger, and Eurydice,
the wife he had reclaimed, was following behind
— a stipulation Proserpina had required —
a sudden folly seized the careless lover,
folly crying out to be forgiven, overlooked. But Hell is unforgiving.
Having almost gained the light of day, desire overcame him
and unthinkingly, alas, he looked back at Eurydice,
now nearly his again.
That moment all his work was rendered vain,
the bargain he had made with heartless Pluto broken,
and a triple clap of thunder sounded in the marshes of Avernus.
Eurydice cried out, “What dreadful madness, Orpheus,
has brought catastrophe on you and me?
Look! The cruel fates recall me, and the sleep of death
is sealing up my swimming eyes.
Farewell now; they are bearing me away;
I am surrounded by the vastness of the night.
I stretch my hands to you, but they are weak
and — oh, alas! — they’re yours no longer.”
So she spoke, and instantly, like smoke that mingles in thin air,
she vanished from his sight a different way.
She never saw the youth again.
He vainly clutched at shadows,
with so many things he wished to say now left unsaid.
Charon refused to let him back across the Styx.

What could he do? Where could he go,
a man whose wife had twice been stolen from him?
Could his weeping move Hell’s rulers?
To which gods could he appeal?
Eurydice was dead and cold already,
floating on the Styx in Charon’s boat.
They say he wept for seven whole months,
day after day, beneath a lofty crag
beside the river Strymon, far from human habitation;
and that in cool valleys where he told his story,
savage tigers were affected
and the oak trees bent their heads to listen.
It was sorrow like the nightingale’s,
who sits in shadow in a poplar tree
and mourns her young ones’ loss, a cruel ploughman
having seen their nest and plucked her unfledged offspring from it;
all night long she weeps upon a branch,
repeating time and time again her piteous song
and filling all the air with poignant lamentation.
For him there was no thought of other loves, of other brides.
He wandered through the frozen North, alone,
along the icy river Tanais, across the Russian mountains,
grieving for Eurydice, now lost,
bewailing Pluto’s favour, suddenly withdrawn;
until he came to Thrace. Here the Ciconian women,
jealous of his pure devotion, while performing
holy rites and midnight orgies in the name of Bacchus,
tore the young man limb from limb
and strewed his broken body far and wide across the plains.
And as his head, now severed from his beautiful white neck,
was bobbing in the current of the river Hebrus,
still his tongue, though cold in death, and disembodied voice
with failing breath called to Eurydice, his poor Eurydice!
The banks gave back “Eurydice” the whole length of the stream.’

P for Persephone (Περσεφόνη)

When first he brought me — ravished, captive — here to dwell,
my self-styled husband proudly showed me his estate:
souls twittering like bats in cheerless Asphodel;
the tortures of the damned, now penitent, too late;
his favoured pet, that monstrous, multi-headed dog;
ghosts lapping at the pool of Lethe, to forget;
the foul miasma of the clammy river fog.

From such sights I, an innocent, recoiled. And yet
a long familiarity has dulled disgust
except when my defiance mingles with my fear
at his suggestive smile. I make no false pretence
of pleasure as he slakes his vile entitled lust.
I triumph by indifference: small recompense
I take as Queen of Hell for three months of the year.

Graves is clear that Persephone’s annual stay in the underworld was of three months. Periods of four and six months have also been asserted.

The Quest for Q

Q’s ancient parent, qoppa, which I’ve hunted now for weeks,
was seen as surplus baggage by the later, classic Greeks.
And since no god or human (Greek) begins their name with Q,
I’ll quickly quit this quatrain; I’ve still R to Z to do.

R for Rhea (Ῥέα)

A gruesome tale I tell: my theme is incest and infanticide.
The earth, in late eruption from the waves, had barely dried
when Titan Cronus took his Titan sister Rhea for his bride.

Their father Uranus (whose mother was his consort, by the way),
whom Cronus had castrated, whispered on his deathbed as he lay,
‘My son, beware; for one of your own seed will vanquish you one day.’

This dreadful presage Cronus — paranoid, tyrannical — believed.
Three daughters and two sons his sister bore. He ate them all. Bereaved,
distraught, revengeful and still fertile, Rhea once again conceived

and gave birth to a sixth, a boy. She hid him in a cave on Crete.
She wrapped a stone in swaddling clothes for daddy cannibal to eat.
Despite attacks of indigestion, Cronus swallowed the deceit.

Years passed. Cared for by local shepherds, Zeus — for it was he — grew up.
He got a job back home, at court, as bearer of the royal cup
in which his mother mixed emetic; when her husband took a sup

he vomited the stone, and then five children, blinking in the light,
who thanked their brother and their mum; and all resolved to fight
to punish their progenitor and his disgusting appetite.

Result: a ten-year war in earth and heaven. Zeus, plus siblings, won.
Now Rhea thought her troubles at an end. In truth, they’d just begun.
Poor lady! She, once too indulgent parent of an errant son,

forbade her thunderbolt-deploying sex-offending spawn to wed.
The ban inflamed his lust. The worst particulars I leave unsaid.
Impatient readers who enjoy that kind of thing may skip to Z.

S for the Sirens (Σειρῆνες)

A sight to steer away from, that quartet
of squatters on their victims’ bones; and yet
their braided voices worked such sweet accord
that passing mariners leapt overboard
or beached the island in small boats, enthralled
and helpless when the fatal music called.

One day a ship came by whose crew seemed deaf.
The singers heard, above the roar of surf,
a raging voice repeating a command
to alter course and haul up on the sand.

Orders ignored. The battered craft sailed on.
Enchantresses no more, their spell undone,
the killers, dying, offered to the air
an untuned final chorus of despair.

T for Tantalus (Τάνταλος)

The food and drink on Mount Olympus were the best,
as Tantalus — a frequent royal dinner guest
and intimate of Father Zeus — could testify.
The gourmet revelled in exalted company.
His fatal flaw: this rare good fortune turned his head.
Back down on earth, to awestruck mortal friends he said,
‘Here, try this nectar and ambrosia, on me,’
and shared the delicacies smuggled from on high.

Such hubris always brings disaster in the end.
The gods received a message from ‘A grateful friend’:
‘Mighty Olympians, King Tantalus invites
your majesties to dinner; bring your appetites.’
Their majesties obliged, and sat down in the hall.
Last-minute panic: would their portions be too small?
The overreacher’s mind was paralysed by fear.
His guests left hungry… an unthinkable idea

so he despatched his son, chopped up the corpse, and threw
the joints of butchered flesh into the bubbling stew,
brought it to table and enjoined the gods to eat.
They weren’t deceived. They knew the smell of human meat,
and none* would taste a dish prepared by filicide.
Zeus killed his host. The punishment he specified
that Tantalus should suffer to the end of time
in Hell was thoughtfully designed to fit the crime.

He dangles from a fruit tree’s branch above a lake
whose waters lap his chin. Each time he tries to slake
his agonising thirst, the crystal waves recede
and drain to mud. Remorseful at his former greed,
he salivates to see the food the fruit tree bears:
ripe olives, pomegranates, apples, figs and pears.
This one he’ll grasp… a breath of wind… away it sways,
out of the overreacher’s reach. He spends his days
with howling belly and cracked tongue: a gruesome sight.
He’ll hang there for eternity; and serve him right.

U for Uranus (Οὐρανός)

First mating with his mother, then castrated by their son, who hurled
the sickle and his father’s severed genitals far out to sea,
where formed a foam from which arose the loveliest woman in the world,
whose beauty brought no consolation; whispering, before he died,
the prophecy which drove his mutilator to infanticide,
he posted, even by Greek standards, a calamitous CV.

V for Venus, the Woman in the Moon

After Victor Hugo — La Lune

To start with an apology, I’ve cheated once with K,
whose hero’s Welsh, not Greek. With V, the paucity’s the same
and so I offer Aphrodite with her Roman name.
She’s in a pickle. Here’s what Victor Hugo has to say:

The gods on Mount Olympus were the terror of the Greeks.
Descending one day, Venus fell and badly bruised her cheeks,
and when I say ‘her cheeks’ I’m not referring to her face.

The men down on the earth looked up and laughed at this disgrace.
‘The gods,’ they said, ‘whom normally we worship and revere
don’t strike us with such awe when we observe them from the rear.’

‘Right then,’ said Venus, ‘since you’ve seen the tender side of me,
I’m emigrating to a place where that is all you’ll see!’

The man who gazes at the moon still feels a sharp regret
that views of Venus’ bottom are the only views he’ll get.

In Want of a W

If I was short of Vs, I’m doubly short of Ws.
The symbol’s orthographic fate is similar to Q’s:
digamma was an ancient letter later thought de trop
(these lame excuses, valued reader, make you cross, I know),
and starts no name of heroine or hero in my text.
So, craving your indulgence, I shall hurry to the next.

X for Xuthus (Ξοῦθος)

Creüsa’s husband Xuthus was ashamed. He had no heir.
He made a pilgrimage to Delphi, hoping to be told
how best this lack could be supplied. Imagine his surprise
to hear the oracle announce, ‘The person you’ll first meet
when you depart the sanctuary is your only son.’
He stumbled out, and looked, and there stood Ion. Xuthus thought,
‘Wild nights I had a-plenty in my youth. This fair young man
is living proof.’ ‘Dear boy,’ he cried, ‘embrace me as my child!
Apollo’s sacred oracle declares I am your sire.’

Until this moment knowing nothing of his origins,
the lad was thunderstruck and overjoyed.

                                                                                   He was deceived.
Not Xuthus, but Apollo, was his true progenitor.
The god had coupled with Creüsa. She brought forth a boy.
Apollo, cruelly, had snatched him from his mother’s breast
and spirited him far away, to selfsame Delphi, where
the innocent had grown up, named and cared for by the priests,
who’d trained him in the service of the temple.

                                                                                             Thus things stood.

Exultant, Xuthus now possessed his heart’s desire: an heir.
Creüsa, as she thought, was childless. Jealous and enraged,
she tried to murder Ion with a cup of poisoned wine.
He poured a due libation to the gods before he drank.
A dove flew down to sip the pious gift he’d spilled. It died.
Discovered in her crime, Creüsa fled to sanctuary
at Apollo’s altar, craving mercy of the god,
whence Ion in his righteous fury tried to haul her out
until a priestess intervened and told them both the truth,
to be concealed from Xuthus, who must cleave to the belief
that he had fathered Ion on a Maenad.

                                                                            In good time
Creüsa, pardoned, gave her grateful husband two more sons.
The erstwhile cuckold never knew his firstborn was not his.

Why no Ypsilon (Υψιλον)?

It’s called Pythagoras’s letter. To the great man’s mind,
its bifurcation from a single stem (in upper case)
stood as a symbol of decisions we are called upon
to make, uncertain at life’s road’s divides: virtue or vice?
(These existential moments visit me, not once or twice,
but constantly, and give no warning as to time or place.)
Orthography as image of the moral course we set:
a beautiful idea. But Greek mythology, I find,
includes no character whose name begins with Ypsilon,
so, as with Q and W, I’ll pass on with regret.

Z for Zeus (Ζεύς)

His titles were as boastful as their litany was long:
Arcadian, Immortal, Saviour, Gracious, Warlike, Strong…
Fine monikers are covers for recidivists in crime
made harmless and canonical by scholarship and time.
He was the father of the gods and specialist in rape:
incontinent abuser in an ever-shifting shape
as serpent, treading swan, as eagle or as shower of gold.
And are such acts among ‘the greatest stories ever told’?
Should we be horrified? ‘It’s only ancient myth,’ we say.
But Zeus would be locked up if he came down to earth today.

Envoi

These lyrics I began in springtime. As I turn the page
in autumn sunshine on their stories, shall I leave behind
such words as ‘hubris’ and ‘catastrophe’? Or will I find
I need a lexis of disaster for our present age?

Brittany and London, May to November 2024