ABSTRACT
Victorian men and women developed radically different visions of Persephone and radically different lyrical traditions centred on this troubled and troubling goddess. As we have just seen, Victorian women like Jean Ingelow and Dora Greenwell emphasize the human dimension of the myth; they explore the relationship between Demeter and Persephone and the strain on the mother-daughter bond following the daughter’s marriage and/or sexual initiation.1 Victorian men approach this figure from a much more otherworldly perspective, emphasizing the theological and philosophical rather than the social resonances of the tale. While in Ingelow and Greenwell Persephone is imprisoned by her relationship to a man, in poetry by Victorian men she is trapped within an “empire of Despair” (de Vere 23), a world of death and darkness. In short, Victorian poetry on Persephone focuses on the love and solidarity between mother and daughter and on death. These are precisely the themes stressed in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, but Victorians separate what the Hymn has put together.
