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Name Helen, Circe, Graces, Muses, or other denizens of myth in a depiction of an everyday scene and you may accomplish one, or some combination of, four things: elevate the daily to the mythic through comparison, reduce the mythic to the daily by equation, highlight the drabness of the daily through contrast, or emphasize the elevation of the mythic through the same device.

At the start of Helen Agonistes, published in the current issue of Kaleidowhirl, Kate Bernadette Benedict achieves, on one level, the second of these. Rather than presenting us with a naturally gorgeous woman (a Helen) whose strength comes from her hair (implied through a connection to Samson Agonistes), we are presented with a woman who moans “syllables of woe”. On another level, however, the woman whose hair now requires “hair dye kit” and “applicator bottle” has lost the hair that was her beauty, even if not as literally as Samson lost the hair that was his strength. The gray of old age is heightened to a betrayal. Samson’s agonies in captivity fill the syllables Aunt Helen utters in what would otherwise be a weak line.

Aunt Helen, however, manages to avoid blindness from the vapors and cold chemical goop: she shuts her eyes. If Samson’s blindness in Milton’s tragedy represented his internal blindness, this shows Aunt Helen as a much more aware individual. She is elevated by contrast with a figure from myth, which works in the opposite direction of a typical allusion– a subtle turn that reflects well on Benedict’s skill as a poet. After this elevation and after further metamorphoses that elevate her higher with suggestions of mythic status (“[p]art hornet now, part woman and part snake”), that she “strides into the street with swaying hips /
to launch a widow’s Sunday night alone, / to launch a thousand nights alone, not ships” suggests finally the ultimate inaccessibility of mythic heights. Even if a powerful witch and the very guardians of art assist you, you can only ever be comparable to mythic figures, never a true being of myth.

Indeed, these figures cannot assist you, only a sister who may merit partial comparison may: “Mother scores the hair in even parts, / methodical as Circe at her spinning, / serene in deed as any Grace or Muse.”

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1. One-Poem Review: How to make a pot of tea by Helen Ivory

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