ABSTRACT
We have seen Persephone among the flowers, or approaching grey suburbs; we have also seen her as an embodiment of or a voice for blank nothingness. What we have not seen, in poems of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is the virgin with the sheaf in her hand-Virgo bearing Spica, the archetype imposed by an agricultural society on an amorphous scattering of springtime stars. What has happened to the daughter of the corn goddess, to the rural Persephone who embodies the promise of food and the regenerative energies of the field?1 Has the rural Kore altogether vanished in the Victorian era, dragged down into nothingness by the deadly hand of an urbanizing, industrializing Hades? Has the fertility that she embodies become irrevocably demonized by pessimism?
