The Myth in Poetry - Book Report/Review Example

of uncertainty and decides to spend her time in making a funeral robe for her husband's father. She weaves the robe all day long but then unravels it at night (Atwood, 2005). Thus she is involved in a task that she will not finish because of her own actions. The myth has come to represent the futile process of waiting for something or someone who will never return, as well as the procrastination involved with many people who constantly start things but never finish them. The conversational tone of this poem, written in free verse continues with the suggestion that "you can't keep weaving all day/ And undoing it all through the night;/ Your arms get tired" (emphasis added).

Millay takes a distinctly modern and realistic perspective upon the old myth. Thus she has wiped her eyes with her apron, a natural action that is not included within the myth as it has been handed down, but which Penelope would surely have done had she been a real person. This attempt at making both Penelope and the narrator of the poem real is essential to its meaning. The repetition of "and" at the beginning of the next two lines shows the process of near despair within the waiting woman. It is as if the poem's speed increases as she starts to pour out the sadness of her position.

As she states that "suddenly you burst into tears; There is simply nothing else to do", it becomes clear that she wants the reader to empathize, not just with Penelope or with the unnamed narrator, but with all women who are forced to wait because a man is more interested in other things. It may be a legendary hero going off to fight the Trojan War or it might be a modern husband watching football all weekend long. The "ancient gesture" phrase is repeated in the second stanza as the narrator considers the context of what she has just fone.

The 'listing which occurs in this stanza - "ancient gesture, authentic, antique . . . . tradition, classic, Greek" is the consideration of an academic mind listing all the various ways that the gesture can indeed be linked to that ancient one of Penelope. But suddenly there is a surprise in the middle of the second stanza as the poet states that "Ulysses did this too". It is as if she wants the reader to think, amazed, "he did". But the question is soon answered by the fact that it is indeed only a "gesture" in the second meaning of the word.

Millay makes it a complex word through using both meanings of the word in the poem. Initially it is a physical meaning, the "gesture" of a hand lifting an apron, but in the second meaning it is "gesture" as in something that is not really meant. It is "just a gesture" rather than a genuinely felt emotion. Millay suggests that the successful public man, such as