Persephone, Falling Analysis

Italian Sonnet"Persephone, Falling" is a sneaky sonnet. We know it's a sonnet because it is fourteen lines long and has a clear turn after the eighth line, just where we would expect it in an Itali...

The speaker of a poem (or any work of literature) is always tricky. Obviously, the speaker of the poem is always technically the poet. We mean, they wrote the thing. But this poem gives us some oth...

There are two settings at work in "Persephone, Falling." The first setting is the allusion itself—Persephone's fall into Hades. We discuss that over in the "Shout-Outs" section.The other setting,...

Even though this is a sonnet, it doesn't have a formal rhyme scheme. To make up for this lack of formality, Rita Dove weaves in some sneaky sound effects to make her poem sing. Let's get a quick li...

With a short poem like this one, it's not likely that the poet would waste words in a title. Rita Dove makes sure to tell us an awful lot about her poem before it even starts. Here's a quick rundow...

There are a few things that make this poem so Rita Dove. The main thing is the content. Much of her work focuses on individuals in relationship to their families. She looks closely at growing up an...

(1) Sea LevelYeah, sure, you need to go look up the myth to really understand it, but the vocabulary is simple and the sentences aren't complex. It takes a little bit of a turn after the first stan...

In the second and third Matrix movies, Persephone is the name of a character seated in a place called Club Hel. Sound familiar? (Source.)There is a death metal band called Persefone, and a German d...

PG13There's nothing really explicit here, but there are some second meanings to some of the lines. Either way, let's face it: the poem's about Hades having his way with a teenage goddess. Any poem...

Literary and Philosophical References:The main allusion, which begins in the title, is the story of Persephone's abduction by Hades. In Ovid's version of Persephone's capture, she is pictured as pi...