Orpheus and Eurydice in the Twentieth Century: Lawrence, H. D., and the Poetics of the Turn

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Even in its earliest known versions, the Orpheus myth encompasses nearly half a dozen archetypically potent situations, and the range of its associations swells with each generation's retellings. In his most positively suggestive roles, Orpheus is celebrated as the mystical priest, founder and patron of the Orphic cult; the consummate poet, whose song can charm trees, stones, and even the dark denizens of the Underworld; and the great romantic hero whose love transcends and, briefly, conquers death. On a less triumphant note, however, he is also remembered as the overambitious quester whose failure to rescue Eurydice has come to symbolize the futility of trying to outwit death. As the dismembered victim of jealous Maenads, he represents, even more ambivalently, both the imperfect mortal whose song has failed to charm and the deathless poet whose music issues even from the lips of his decapitated head. In this final manifestation he becomes, like his Egyptian counterpart Osiris, a physically incoherent being who yet retains all the integrity of identity-thus enacting, as twentieth-century writers as diverse as Cocteau, Anouilh, Rilke, and Blanchot have recognized,' the situation, anguished yet articulate, of the modern poet. To a poetic generation frantically scrambling to shore fragments of meaning against its spiritual ruins, Orpheus guarantees, in Walter