SOURCE: "Knowledge Puffeth Up," in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Vol. 12, No. 2, Spring-Summer, 1985, pp. 144-59.

[In the following review of The Blue Estuaries, Dorian discusses themes of anger, fear, and womanhood in Bogan's poetry, arguing that "Bogan chose an archetypal perspective which enabled her to circumscribe the demands of narrative, to avoid the culturally accepted gestures of female identity."]

For Louise Bogan, writing wove a lifeline, a silver cord between heaven and hell. No longer plucking self-knowledge from the tree, she reached for the branches of song. How difficult that aspiration when one considers how long women have been punished for the theft of an apple, forbidden to write by the demands of silence and mute suffering. Bogan's poetry was intricately laced with this taboo against self-revelation, which she conceived never in didactic or argumentative terms, but as song. In so doing, she broke with one tradition by keeping to another.

Theodore Roethke, in his definitive essay on Bogan, found that her poetry recalled the lyrics of Campion and Jonson, which frequently served as texts for music. Roethke's aim was to place Bogan's poems not so much as lyrics meant to accompany musical setting, but "as part of the severest lyric tradition in English." Certainly hers is a poetry that "sings," that "imitates music in effect," and not a poetry of speech. Without ever indulging in the effusions of personality, Bogan based her poetry on direct expression which repeatedly filtered the rhythms of colloquial speech into an epigrammatical diction. Her return to the Renaissance lyric—be it that of Campion or Donne—refreshed and aerated twentieth-century poetry as her very discretion seems, nonetheless, to call for accompaniment—a lute, a viol, a cello—and to echo what is felt but is left unsaid: "Pain is a furrow healed / And she may love you most. / Cry, song, cry / And hear your crying lost."

Louise Bogan believed that all her talent came from her mother's side of the family, so that the source of psychic hurt in her life seemed to her also the source of the means of triumph over that hurt. Whatever damage Mary and Daniel Bogan inflicted on Louise's capacity to give and receive "normal" love, they never tried to suppress her gifts, which were brought to birth with the inextinguishable strength of all powers as natural as they are compensatory.

So states Elizabeth Frank, who in her recent critical biography, Louise Bogan: A Portrait, made much headway in unearthing the "actual occasions" which Bogan so meticulously swept out of her poems, her criticism, her public life. Bogan's letters and criticism offer only a fragmentary look at the woman, whetting as much curiosity as they satisfy. And she had difficulty with her memoirs, a task she returned to over and over without finally completing herself. She did not like to reveal.

In Frank's attempt to plait psychological motivations with the poems, she made clear that the privacy of Bogan's work served more than a literary function, that like the poetry itself, it drew its source from Bogan's relationship with her mother. The three poems discussed at length in this essay—"Medusa," "Cassandra," and "The Sleeping Fury"—acted as drawing boards upon which Bogan transformed those complicated feelings toward her mother into a public, lyric poetry.

The daughter of a New England mill worker and a handsome but thorny woman, Louise Bogan was born on August 11, 1897, in Livermore Falls, Maine. In 1882, when Mary Murphy Shields married Daniel Bogan in Portland, Maine, she was only seventeen; for her, marriage was a matter of course and the only available means of gaining autonomy. Instead, it thwarted her desire for cultivated society, and she early lost all romantic interest in her husband. It seems symbolic of the problems that would follow that Mary Bogan would continue to grow after her youthful marriage, to tower five inches above her husband—a fact for which she never forgave him.

Mary Bogan played out her frustrations upon each member of her family. She consorted with other men, deserting home for days on end, leaving no clues to her whereabouts. Though it is difficult to know just how many times this actually occurred, it happened often enough to have broken any sense of security Louise and her younger brother Charles could have felt. On occasion, the daughter would be brought along on these trysts, to sit alone in the hall, "to see the ringed hand on the pillow. I weep by the hotel window, as she goes down the street with another…."

From childhood on Bogan carried the knowledge of her mother's deception, which shamed her and led her to insulate herself from others. Revealing her mother's affairs would only have provoked her mother's anger and threatened the remaining stability of family life. So the harboring of secrets became a norm—and "truth became charged with doubleness."

"I never truly feared her," Louise Bogan later concluded, "Her tenderness was the other side of her terror." Even so, by the age of eight, or even perhaps as early as five or six, Louise Bogan was an exile from conventional life and had become, "what I was for half of my life: the semblance of a girl, in which some desires and illusions had been early assassinated: shot dead."

                  (Elizabeth Frank: A Portrait)

But Mary Bogan did not want her daughter to repeat her mistakes, and encouraged her to attend what is now Boston's Girls' Latin school. There she began to write verse, and she tells us, "By the age of eighteen, I had a thick pile of manuscript in a drawer in the dining room—and had learned every essential of my trade." But in 1916, at eighteen, and much against her parents' protests, she forfeited a scholarship from Radcliffe to marry Curt Alexander, an Army man. Within a year, in the Panama Canal Zone, Louise Bogan gave birth to a child. But the marriage was doomed, just as the marriage of Louise's parents had been, and within a year, Bogan, daughter in arms, returned to Boston. Although the couple attempted two brief reconciliations, they separated permanently in 1919. The following year her estranged husband died of pneumonia.

The widowed Bogan moved to New York. In an unusually brief time, the twenty-two-year-old established a reputation as a literary figure. Her poems began to appear with regularity in the leading journals, and she kept frequent company with Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Malcolm Cowley, Lola Ridge, and Edmund Wilson, who would encourage her career as a critic. At twenty-six, she married Raymond Holden, a writer and sometime editor at The New Yorker. This period hovered behind Bogan's first volume of poems, Body of this Death, of which she would write so eloquently to Theodore Roethke many years later:

And let me tell you right now, the only way to get away is to get away; pack up and go. Anywhere. I had a child, from the age of 20, remember that, to hold me back, but I got up and went just the same, and I was, God help us, a woman. I took the first job that came along. Then there was a depression on, as there is now, not quite so bad, but still pretty poor, and I lived on 18 bucks a week and spent a winter in a thin suit and a muffler. But I was free. And when this time, I couldn't free myself by my own will, because my will was suffering from a disease peculiar to it, I went to the madhouse for six months, under my own steam, mind you, for no one sent me there, and I got free.—When one isn't free, one is a thing, the thing of others, and the only point in this rotten world, is to be your own, to hold the scepter and mitre over yourself, in the immortal words of Dante.

     (Louise Bogan: What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters)

During those early years in New York, perhaps as she sat at her desk, she must have thought how no woman in her family had chosen, could have chosen at twenty-two to survive on her own wits. Now as much an exile from herself as once she had been from experience, she confronted these conditions in "A Tale," a poem of astute self-knowledge. Where once the futility of her family and her marriage had demanded escape, now her own unconscious called her to face something dreadful in herself. Traveling to the precipice of change, she arrived at the first moment of self-consciousness—if she was afraid of what she had seen, the poem, as poised and skillful as its hero, defied that fear. And so it was also the poet and the poem who looked "quietly upon each other."

      This youth too long has heard the break
      Of waters in a land of change.
      He goes to see what suns can make
      From soil more indurate and strange.
 
      He cuts what holds his days together
      And shuts him in, as lock on lock:
      The arrowed vane announcing weather,
      The tripping racket of a clock;
 
      Seeking, I think, a light that waits
      Still as a lamp upon a shelf,—
      A land with hills like rocky gates
      Where no sea leaps upon itself.
 
      But he will find that nothing dares
      To be enduring, save where, south
      Of hidden deserts, torn fire glares
      On beauty with a rusted mouth,—
 
      Where something dreadful and another
      Look quietly upon each other.

By dramatizing internal conflict she avoided the insipid revelations of an egotistical personality—"The lyric, if it is at all authentic, is based on emotion, on some actual occasion, some real confrontation," Bogan wrote. Later, poetic reflections would be posed in dialogue and exhortation, in the subterfuges of the mythological mask, often to be enhanced by rhythmical variations, which permitted her, paradoxically, to move out of the world of appearances into the world of the great archetypal presences, to make hers a poetry not of the individual self, but a map of the feminine sensibility.

In "Medusa" Bogan continues to examine the nature of fear, to find it the primary source of evil. "To decapitate = to castrate," wrote Freud in his short essay on the male castration complex, "Medusa's Head." "The terror of Medusa is a terror of castration that is linked with the sight of something—primarily the female genitals, probably those of an adult, essentially those of the mother." Freud's theory, of course, was shaped by the Greek myth, in which the attempts to destroy the Gorgon were, in effect, the efforts of men to overcome and control the threat of all libidinous female sexuality. But in Bogan's version, it is a woman who looks upon the mother. Mutated and mutating, both mother and daughter are condemned, trapped inside the self, outside time.

       I had come to the house, in a cave of trees,
       Facing a sheer sky.
       Everything moved,—a bell hung ready to strike,
       Sun and reflection wheeled by.
       When the bare eyes were before me
       And the hissing hair,
       Held up at the window, seen through a door,
       The stiff bald eyes, the serpents on the forehead
       Formed in the air.
       This is a dead scene forever now.
       Nothing will ever stir.
       The end will never brighten more than this,
       Nor the rain blur.
 
       The water will always fall, and will not fall,
       And the tipped bell make no sound.
       The grass will always be growing for hay
       Deep on the ground.
 
       And I shall stand here like a shadow
       Under the great balanced day,
       My eyes on the yellow dust, that was lifting in the wind,
       And does not drift away.

Though Freud had begun his exploration of the family romance at the time of Bogan's "Medusa," her poem was one of the first to probe the psychological complexities of the mother and daughter relationship. But the fate of Medusa has been seen for centuries as akin to Persephone's, both ravished by dark gods and forced to go among the dead: Persephone reigned as the Queen of the Underworld; Medusa was transformed into a forbidding aspect of the Queen of Death. Persephone's name, in fact, may well be derived from a pre-Hellenic word that has been given Greek form, meaning "she who was killed by Perseus." Jung and Kerényi, in Essays on a Science of Mythology, note the grim, repellent power of these figures:

What we conceive philosophically as the element of non-being in Persephone's nature appears, mythologically, as the hideous Gorgon's head…. It is not, of course, pure non-being, rather the sort of non-being from which the living shrink as from something with a negative sign: a monstrosity that has usurped the place of the unimaginably beautiful, the nocturnal aspect of what by day is the most beautiful of all things.

Inherent in Persephone's mystery is the unfolding of sexual desire which severs her from her mother and the idyllic world of childhood. It is the mythic, unspeakable pain of that separation—and the mother's ensuing anger, the daughter's terror—that rests at the heart of "Medusa," just as it is Persephone who stands before the raging Gorgon in Bogan's poem. As the future looms dark before her, the world becomes an open door, and she is tempted out. But she cannot move; she remains in deadlock, in shadow, eclipsed. She cannot assert herself against the image of the mother any more than she can overcome the consequences of her own sexuality. To break from the past, from the allembracing mother, from the guilt and knowledge of her "monstrous" sexuality, is an act of heresy. She becomes stone and statue, a stilled slayer of the Gorgon/Mother, acting out her trauma. "For becoming stiff means an erection," Freud continued in "Medusa's Head." "Thus in the original situation, it offers consolation to the spectator, he is still in possession of a penis, and the stiffening reassures him of the fact." In Bogan's poem the female speaker, standing as if for eternity under the great balanced day, assumes the masculine stance—in erectus; avoiding her feminine sexuality, she succumbs to non-being.

The tone of Bogan's poem suggests her submissiveness, the severity of her guilt: the uniform syntax is a kind of box, a cage. There is no hortatory voice, no banging on the walls of her prison. The sounds of the words, and not their meaning, delicately modulate from stanza to stanza: a succession of open "a" and "o" rhymes, "fall/hay," "sound/ground," "shadow/away." Bogan cuts away at the myth of motherhood mellifluously. She reverses the Pygmalion myth. The mother sculpts the living daughter into stone, "forever young," "the unravished bride of quietness." The desire for experience is uttered only as longing in the poem's music; its language dissembles.

Behind the music comes the undressing: the poet is afraid of what she has seen—and the consequences of its telling. Between the seer and the seen runs an umbilical cord: An "old barnacled umbilicus, Atlantic cable / Keeping itself in a state, it seems, of miraculous repair," wrote Sylvia Plath in her "Medusa," a poem that detonated the idealized myth of motherhood. Knowledge puffeth up, it deforms us, it expands us, it changes us. Where Plath named Medusa frankly as the mother, in a voice that refused to stay sequestered in decorous language, Bogan submitted to the mother, burying herself musically in a language against which neither she nor her mother could rage. Yet Bogan's poetry made Plath's possible by initiating explorations below the conscious ego, focusing clearly on feminine psychology. As Roethke was the first to note, "the man-in-the-mother"—the mother within—was most urgent to Bogan. By internalizing conflict, she assumed moral responsibility for her subject and its masterly tone. Yet Plath and Bogan carved their demons like recalcitrant marble into poetic form as their poems nearly scorched the fabric of everyday life. Myth validated their fear, stamped it with an archetypal dye, and placed their terror in history—in the country of women. In return Plath and Bogan gave us poems—children born—Bellerophon and Chrysaor—freed from Medusa's fallen head.

The verse of contemporary female poets is marked by an abundance of poems concerned with myth. In the essay "The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking," Alicia Ostriker discussed the phenomena:

Since 1960 one can count over a dozen major works of revisionist myth published by American women. In them the old stories are changed, changed utterly by female knowledge of female experience, so that they can no longer stand as foundations of collective male fantasy. Instead they are corrections; they are representations of what women find divine and daemonic in themselves; they are retrieved images of what women have collectively and historically suffered; in some cases they are instructions for survival.

Among the "breakthrough works" appearing between 1959 and 1965, Ostriker cites Van Duyn's Valentines to the Wide World, H.D.'s Helen in Egypt, Levertov's The Jacob's Ladder, Rich's Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, Kizer's Pro Femina, Sexton's To Bedlam and Part Way Back, Plath's Ariel. Bogan's poetry is omitted, of course, because it predates the works under discussion (Collected Poems appeared in 1953, including "Medusa" [1921], "Cassandra" [1926], and "The Sleeping Fury" [1936]). Yet, however much Bogan's poetry might be considered a precursor to the work of contemporary female poets—for all its attention to the "subterranean tradition of female self-projection and self-exploration," Bogan, even during the radical movements of the Thirties, was opposed to the politicizing of literature. Nor did she ever intend anything like destroying the "male hegemony over language." Rather, as Roethke wrote, hers was a poetry upon which "the ground beat of the great tradition can be heard, with the necessary subtle variations."

Those variations, of course, are important. Like other poets of the modernist generation, Bogan was working through problems implicit in Romantic theory and practice. Although her three mythological poems follow a Romantic tradition of "mythic revisionism" in which "the poet personally experiences forces within the self so overwhelming that they must be described as gods and goddesses, titans, demiurges and demons," in versification and attitude she held to an Elizabethan mode. A poet of disguise and discretion, she employed not only the mythological mask, but the masks of others ("he" as in "A Tale," the child, the girl, the romantic), sometimes omitting reference to the poem's speaker altogether, in order to release herself from the modernist dilemma of subjectivity. Like the Renaissance lyric, her poetry, rarely if ever, dramatized "the voice speaking to itself or to nobody. It was always a directed performance." Remarkably like Eliot in his dictum that "Poetry is not an expression of personality, but an escape from personality," Bogan believed that "the poet represses the outright narrative of his life. He absorbs it, like life itself." This stance served her position as a female poet, as it enabled Bogan to speak not merely for herself, but for the many.

       To me, one silly task is like another.
       I bare the shambling tricks of lust and pride.
       This flesh will never give a child its mother,—
       Song, like a wing, tears through my breast, my side,
       And madness chooses out my voice again,
       Again. I am the chosen no hand saves:
       The shrieking heaven lifted over men,
       Not the dumb earth wherein they set their graves.

In "Cassandra," Bogan exhorts the mixed mind she bore toward her own poetic identity as she finds the voice of the sibyl whom Christa Wolf has called, in her own Cassandra, "the first professional working woman in literature," she who stands "as the watchword for the condition of women." Tricked by Apollo, yet intelligent, cunning, Cassandra snatched from the god the gift of prophecy. For her betrayal, for her desire to stand close to the gods and share in their nature, she "would bare the shambling tricks of lust and pride"—like Medusa, to be condemned for hubris, for what in the Greek world held the place of sin. But it was not guilt that Cassandra felt upon her punishment, but misfortune. Nor did she know regret, for the Greeks had no conception of choice, only fate: And so she tells us: "I am the chosen no hand saves." Torn as she is by song, "the shrieking heaven lifted over men," Bogan's Cassandra still owed herself something: "self-knowledge, detachment, cool-headedness."

In humanity's struggle to comprehend its irrational impulses, the nature of death and immortality, the seemingly impossible accomplishments of the male hero have been heralded as victories. But Cassandra's visions, miraculous in their own manner, were vehemently rejected. Victims are often attracted to magic, to psychic phenomena, as if the limitless affect of pain, if fully seen, could actually bring clairvoyance, collapse the barriers of time and space. Poet and seer often share a common ground: suffering engenders the lyric cry. For Bogan it came to awesome consequence as she sought to carve the poem out of agony, to bring the poem "to an unbearable point of crisis." Shaping as it does the beginnings of a Shakespearean sonnet, "Cassandra" is refused turn and resolution just as both were denied to its speaker.

One assumes Bogan truncated the sonnet because its traditional connotations were unsuited to Cassandra's character. Although the form was in common use in Bogan's day, its general lack of success in the hands of other female poets—Millay, Teasdale, and Wylie, for example—led Bogan to take up arms against it. Of the sonnet sequence she wrote:

Women should not write them any more! The linked formality makes chance of discursiveness too great, and the sonnet, as such, is never discursive. It is dramatic; the dramatic lyric framework … The early sonnet sequences (Sidney's, for example) are based on a terrific concept of courtly (demanding) passion and morality. They are pointed. They are channeled.—With D.G. Rossetti, etc., the whole thing begins to dissolve.

       (Louise Bogan: What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters)

And later:

It allows women to go on and on, either praising the lover or blaming him. It also allows shows of complete and utter subservience (women rarely write sonnets in a mood of rebellion). It allows, in fact, infinite, hair-splitting wrangling.

 (Bogan/Limmer: Journey Around My Room)

Bogan gets around these problems in "Cassandra"—and in the three complete sonnets included in The Blue Estuaries—by casting the poem in her "to-hell-my-love-with-you-mode," stating with customary asperity and wit "perhaps we gals are at our best on this note." Though we miss the psychological layerings of Browning's dramatic monologues, the subtle plays between narrator and listener, set in a dramatic framework, "Cassandra" is a soliloquy: alone, she speaks out from the stage of history into a void, into the audience of all time, all space. Bogan here is again a master of tone: although even a completed sixteen-line sonnet might seem unequal to the breath of subject, her compression of the music of terror, of anger and self-pity, revenge and victory, avoids the pitfalls of overdramatization and heroine-worship. She concludes with the ring of epigrammatical closure—a mode which had considerable effect upon lyric poetry, and especially the sonnet, during the Renaissance:

To 'dispel' (to undo the spell) or to dismiss is the epigrammatist's characteristic gesture. In love or hate, praise or blame, he is saying something so that he will not have to say it again. He writes a poem not when he is moved but when he ceases to be. He records the moment of mastery—not the emotion, but the attitude that conquered it.

           (Barbara H. Smith: Poetic Closure)

In the final couplet, "Cassandra" confirms that she is subservient to nothing but her own vision; comprehending her anguish, she conquers it, to some extent, does away with its spell. "The blood jet is poetry," Sylvia Plath wrote. "There is no stopping it." Yet, as Christa Wolf remarked. "Cassandra's prophecies have stood the test of time, and it now seems that it was only she who wholly understood herself." If vision and song are a madness, it is not only because they appear so to the world, but because song comes as a possession: it breaks from the body as Eve sprang from the rib of Adam: divine, and yet made human.

In "The Sleeping Fury" Bogan looks beyond anger to anger's cause, and in so doing makes peace with her demons: both mother and muse. Here is the fury, the spirit of anger and revenge, "Hands full of scourges, wreathed with your flames and adders." Avengers of parricide and perjury, the Furies pursued Orestes even after his acquittal for the murder of Clytaemnestra. In "The Sleeping Fury" at last they appear for a moment appeased:

        You are here now,
        Who were so loud and feared, in a symbol before me,
        Alone and asleep, and I at last look long upon you.
 
        Your hair fallen on your cheek, no longer in the semblance of serpents,
        Lifted in the gale; your mouth, that shrieked so, silent.
        You, my scourge, my sister, lie asleep, like a child,
        Who, after rage, for an hour quiet, sleeps out its tears.
 
        The days close to winter
        Rough with strong sound. We hear the sea and the forest,
        And the flames of your torches fly, lit by others,
        Ripped by the wind, in the night. The black sheep for sacrifice
        Huddle together. The milk is cold in the jars.
 
        All to no purpose, as before, the knife whetted and plunged,
        The shout raised, to match the clamor you have given them.
        You alone turn away, not appeased; unaltered, avenger.
 
        Hands full of scourges, wreathed with your flames and adders,
        You alone turned away, but did not move from my side,
        Under the broken light, when the soft nights took the torches.
 
        At thin morning you showed, thick and wrong in that calm,
        The ignoble dream and mask, sly, with slits at the eyes,
        Pretence and half-sorrow, beneath which a coward's hope trembled.
 
        You uncovered at night, in the locked stillness of houses,
        False love due the child's heart, the kissed-out lie, the embraces,
        Made by the two who for peace tenderly turned to each other.
        You who know what we love, but drive us to know it;
        You with your whips and shrieks, bearer of truth and of solitude;
        You who give, unlike men, to expiation your mercy.
 
        Dropping the scourge when at last the scourged advances to meet it,
        You, when the hunted turns, no longer remain the hunter
        But stand silent and wait, at last returning his gaze.
 
        Beautiful now as a child whose hair, wet with rage and tears
        Clings to its face. And now I may look upon you,
        Having once met your eyes. You lie in sleep and forget me.
        Alone and strong in my peace, I look upon you in yours.

Here the mother, Medusa, once her daughter's captor, once captive to herself, returns from the Underworld, from non-being, "Her hair no longer in the semblance of serpents." As the Demeter Erinys she now becomes the "opener of the way," not to death, but to life, her whips and shrieks reshaped as hands, as appeals to justice, harassment now the agency of self-knowledge. Just as the Kore is at root a single entity, so the Fury is recognized in all of her aspects as one, "My scourge, my sister, a child." As actual mother and mother-within, she appears in all of her variety, whole—mending the splintered self, healing the soul's division.

And so Persephone returns, as the speaker of "The Sleeping Fury," risen from her own death, from Medusa's paralyzing stare, to gaze upon her terrible mother, "beautiful now as a child." "It is the Horrible Great Mother that we must conquer in order to reach the symbolic Isis," wrote Bogan to May Sarton in 1955, referring to Erich Neumann's theories. "The symbolism was relevant in my case, I don't know about anyone else's." Seeing, as Neumann did in The Great Mother, the images of the terrible mother as expressions of the consuming unconscious, Bogan must have recognized them as akin to her own psychic foe. Yet the mother, in her luminous aspect, is of "the highest feminine wisdom": "vessel of transformation, blossom, the unity of Demeter, reunited with Kore, Isis, Ceres, the moon goddesses." "To enter into the figure of Demeter means to be pursued, to be robbed, raped, to fail to understand, to rage and grieve, but then to get everything back again." And so she does in "The Sleeping Fury," as daughter nurtures mother, as the mother sleeps like a child whose hair is "wet with rage and tears." From the Underworld, "where the black sheep for sacrifice huddle together," she returns "at thin morning" "no longer the hunter"—and so mother and daughter are reunited, released from the pain of their separation—Persephone risen from the dead, Cassandra from the purgatories of song. Finally fury has become as redemptive as speech. In modern dress, the poem reenacts the myth of Persephone and Demeter, to unfold the mystery of Eleusis: "For to be laid in the fire, and yet to remain alive, that is the secret of immortality."

Elizabeth Frank's careful investigative work led her to the original inspiration for the poem: "L'Erinni Addormentata," which depicts a beautiful Megaera, the jealous Erinys concerned with the punishment of sexual crimes. Bogan brought back a postcard of the image from the Museo Nazionale della Terme in Rome, from a trip made to Europe in 1933 meant as a separation from her husband whom she divorced the following year. And it is fitting that through Megaera, "a symbol before me," Bogan should make peace with "her own punishing rage against her mother's and Holden's betraying sexuality and against herself, perhaps, for wishes and acts confused and obscurely entangled with the people she loved."

For all her admiration of Rilke, Bogan knew how easily poems about art objects lapse into hackneyed statement: by removing all reference to the sculpture, she cleared the poem of all but its true subject. The poem's free verse opens toward an inner expansiveness, reinforcing the "victory of release." Bogan seldom departed from the traditional demands of prosody, believing that without rhyme and meter the poem would cave in beneath the weight of emotion, that formal control permitted the liberation of feeling. Form was responsible for the grace of emotion, for the sensuality of her statement, no matter her subject, as it objectified the poem, creating the distance necessary to look upon it as outside and other. In "The Sleeping Fury," Bogan still exploits form, but in a manner more radical and original than usual. Internally cohesive, its refrainlike repetition of sounds and phrases subtly modulated, "The Sleeping Fury" is almost iconic in form (like many of the poems of Herbert) as the generally three-lined stanzas correspond to her three-headed muse. These many repetitions ("You alone turned away, not appeased, unaltered, avenger," "You alone turned away, but did not move from my side," "You when the hunted turns, no longer remain the hunter," and so on) pivot, return, accrue, as if in litany, until "The Sleeping Fury" concludes in a transformation made possible, it seems, by the alchemy of language itself.

Myth originated in Greek religion as "an attempt to regulate and control man's destiny through ritual." At least in a metaphorical sense, Bogan reenacts that religious impulse here, participating in the mystery of Eleusis through the variety of her repetitions. She "tames and placates" traditional prosody just as she overcomes the oppressive demon of mother and song.

In "The Sleeping Fury," as in "Medusa" and "Cassandra," Bogan chose an archetypal perspective which enabled her to circumscribe the demands of narrative, to avoid the culturally accepted gestures of female identity. In so doing she did not attempt to reclaim the past, but to project the present, to project emotion: "For a writer's power is based not upon his intellect so much as upon his intellect so much as upon his intuition, and his emotions. All art, in spite of the struggle of some critics to prove otherwise, is based on emotion and projects emotion." In her empathy for certain mythological symbols Bogan was transformed by the symbols themselves, to move from "savage innocence," madness, and anxiety to a poetry of mature moral consequence "based upon simple expression, deep insight, and deep joy."