The Goddess [antikvár]

Prefc ace Strange that the self's continuum should outlast The Virgin, Aphrodite, and the Mourning Mother, All loves and griefs, successive deities That hold their kingdom in the human breast. Abandoned by the gods, woman with an aging body That half remembers the Annunciation The passion and the travail and the grief That were the mask of my humanity, I marvel at the soul's indifference. For in her theatre the play is done. The tears are shed; the actors, the immortals In their ceaseless manifestation, elsewhere gone. And I who have been Virgin and Aphrodite, The mourning Isis and the queen of corn Wait for the last mummer, dread Persephone To dance my dust at last into the tomb. Kathleen Raine ^ I have learned about myth from myth—from the discovery of what it means to live a myth. I have learned my way of attending to myth as I went along. Sometime along the way I realized that what I was writing was a kind of autobiography. These chapters interweave childhood memories, dreams from many different periods, and a complex history of identifications. Yet they are clearly written from the perspective of the