Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2017

poems are being pursued a man whom they do not want to be pursued by. In Greek Myth

Thetis was forced to marry Peleus and later gave birth to the well-known hero Achilles. (Low

and Stewart, 1994). The narrator in Thetis is able to change “shape” such as being able to

“shrink… to the size of a bird”, this is both a literal and metaphorical representation of the

Greek figure Thetis. In mythology, Thetis is a shapeshifter and her husband Peleus had to

trap her in order to marry her. The shapeshifting is a representation of conformity, especially

to conforming and “chang[ing]” for a male – a key theme in this poem. Eurydice focuses less

on the societal pressures for women to conform but does look at a woman’s change to being

“different” and not being loved “as [she] is now, so chilled and minimal”. Furthermore, these

poems express feminist ideals in two different ways: the unjustified idea that women must

conform to society and that “you” should not be loved less by being different to what society

wants “you” to be.

The narrator, continuing, in Eurydice describes how she would rather have felt “nothing” and

“emptiness” than to be exposed to the noise and people of the earth that she would encounter

if she were to go back. Eurydice is accustomed to the dim corridors of wherever she is, and is

“used to the king” who does not seem to acknowledge her, the “king” most likely being an

allusion to Hades – the king of the dead. There is another male figure mentioned as “the other

one” and he is “different”. Eurydice feels something different towards this other man. She

almost remembers him, as if from another life. The man sings a song of love to Eurydice, the

same song mentioned earlier as one of “joy and suffering”, but the man doesn't love her as

she is now. He loves her as she used to be, not this woman that she's become: “so chilled and

minimal”. From what one can tell from this poem, the main characters are Eurydice, who is

referred to as "you" throughout the poem, an anonymous "he" who sings a song of love to

Eurydice, and the king of wherever Eurydice is. Eurydice is now “chilled and minimal” and

in a way withdrawn from the world and withdrawn from “the other one”. It seems that

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Goldsmith