The Fates/Moirae
Rosemary Dobson, The Three Fates, 1984. Photograph of poem from The Three Fates & Other Poems, Hale & Iremonger Pty Limited. Copy is courtesy of Summit Orbis Cascade Alliance, University of Oregon Libraries.
Katie Ruesink
In five stanzas, Rosemary Dobson’s poem The Three Fates depicts an unnamed, insignificant man being granted life in the face of his death, his drowning. However, it’s not a life that he can live, extended into old age or immortality; instead he returns backwards down the path he has already taken.
Cursed with reliving his miseries and mistakes exactly as he did before without any way to change, he watches his life unfold behind him. In “reverse order,” people grow younger, he experiences his feelings from end to beginning, and time moves from “day to morning” until reaching his birth, when his life starts “unrolling” again. Dobson explains his request as an “aberration,” which comes from the Latin word aberrare ‘to stray,’ an appeal that is wrong, a “mistake,” because it upsets the order of life and death that humans are bound to follow.
The title of the poem is ‘The Three Fates’ and his appeal for life is to “the three sisters,” the Moirae (or Moirai in Greek and Parcae in Roman myth). The sisters, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, weave the threads of human lives. Sometimes they are considered daughters of Zeus and Themis, a Titan daughter of Uranus and Ge, or alternatively of Night and Erebus, or of Ananke (Necessity) who also may have overarching power over fate. Consistently, as Morford et al. describe, Clotho spins the thread and so the fate of each mortal born; Lachesis apportions the length of the thread and thus the life; and Atropos cuts the thread, bringing death (132).
Although the Fates have control over the lives and decisions of mortals, it’s often death, or final fate, that is the focus in myth – and death is also the fate central to Dobson’s poem. Demeter says that Demophoon “will not be able to escape death and the Fates,” when she stops the transition that will turn the young boy into a god (Homeric Hymn to Demeter 250-274). Uncharacteristically, the Fates personally arrive at the birth of Meleager to foretell his death to his mother, Althaea (Morford et al. 510). In Ovid’s version of Orpheus and Eurydice, Eurydice is killed by a poisonous snakebite, and Orpheus journeys to the underworld to get her back. Orpheus makes an appeal to the Fates: “Reweave, I implore, the fate unwound too fast / Of my Eurydice” (Kenney 345). He argued that Eurydice’s “destiny [was] cut too soon” and so her death should be changed (Lenardon 10.29-39). Dobson brings the long history of appealing against death and the granting of a trial together in her poem, as her protagonist lives longer, but not in a new life.
Dobson focuses on a single path lived over and over, as if that really was the thread of life the sisters had spun for this man. However, in myth there are different interpretations of free-will versus determinism, and how much power the Fates have in human life. As Morford describes, “the working of Moira or the Moirai cannot be overemphasized” in themes of prophecies, godly intervention, and human ‘choice’ to understand how much power people had in their own lives (Morford et al. 132). On one hand, even the gods could not meddle in what the Fates had decided, and sometimes the gods themselves were subject to the Fates. Zeus foresaw his son Scarpedon’s death in the Trojan War, but was unable to change it without upsetting the “established order” already determined (Morford et al. 476). On the other hand, both Orpheus and Althaea were able to interact with the Fates to change the timing of death. And Plato expanded on previous ideas of afterlife to describe some level of individual decision in choosing the body for reincarnation in the Myth of Er, and concluding that “the blame belongs to the one who makes the choice; god is blameless” instead of being at the will of destiny.
Dobson’s poem highlights philosophical issues with which humans have struggled for millenia. Her rendition emphasizes determinism in life, even if death is negotiated he cannot deviate from the life he lived. Outside of this poem, perhaps the reason that the Fates are so closely connected to death is because death is the only clear inevitable end. Dobson describes a man who fights for something that makes him experience his miseries anew, and perhaps Dobson’s message is for us to question whether we would be pleased or suffer agonies if faced with reliving the life we’ve had?
Brandon Durland
The poem “The Three Fates” by Rosemary Dobson is a beautifully unique take on the Three Fates told from a reverse point of view. The poem is on the Three Fates, or the Moirai, which are three sister goddesses who are in charge of determining people’s destiny. In this particular example, a man who is drowning appeals to the Fates and began begging for eternal life, and this was granted. As this wish was granted, he is released from the water and is taken back to shore, putting back on his clothes and goes back home. He then must re-experience all of the pain and suffering he felt throughout his life. He eventually begins to love a woman until one day she and his house vanish, there’s a brief pause, and then this process repeats over again. Although the thought of everlasting life might appeal to some, this take on it is excruciating, and in the beginning of the poem it is said that asking for this everlasting life was a mistake, and an aberration.
As discussed in the textbook “Classical Mythology” by Morford, Lenardon, and Sham, it is said sometimes that Zeus is the father of the Fates (132). The Three Fates were at one point birth spirits, who were explained as three elderly women in charge of the destiny of all individuals. Although the destiny they choose for individuals are usually irrevocable, it is said that sometimes they can be convinced to “alter the fate decreed by their labors” (132).
There are many important symbolic representations throughout the poem that stand out, such as the house that the man returns to. Home is something that represents security and comfort, but the way Dobson explains the man writing poems, crying, and experiencing agonizing passion, shows that this wish for everlasting life was yet again a mistake. Dobson writes about the woman he loved, talks about the swing in the garden, and everything vanishing instantly, showing that he must experience life in reverse watching all these possessions slip away repeatedly. The swing itself was a powerful symbolic object, as the picture of “swinging in the garden” makes one think of youth, and innocence, and joy. The girl is described as “bare-foot” and “straw-hatted” which helps paint the picture of joyfulness, and as he is living his life in reverse the girl is obviously getting younger, where one day the girl, the swing, and the home disappear, showing that the man must watch this innocence and joy slip from his fingertips. One other unique take on a symbolic meaning in the poem is the times of day that is explained throughout the poem. Dobson writes that since the poem is in reverse and him and the woman are getting younger “as they day regressed towards morning,” until everything disappears including the daylight. We can imagine the poem maybe then beginning at night, being symbolic of being in the later years of your adult life, and as his life moves backwards, he experiences the struggles of his adult life (darkness of night) before the joyfulness and innocence of youth (brightness of morning). As the man continues to live his life in reverse, these key points of the different times of day references throughout the poem help pint the picture of sorrow, and sets the tone for the somber feeling of loss that this man will now experience over and over again.
Works Cited
Morford, Mark, et al. Classical Mythology. 11th ed., Oxford UP, 2019.
Homeric Hymn to Demeter 13. Translated by Robert J. Lenardon, 11th ed., Oxford UP, 2019.
Ovid. Metamorphoses 10. Edited by E. J. Kenney, Oxford UP, 1987. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/washington/detail.action?docID=684539. Accessed 1 August 2022.
Plato. Republic (the myth of Er). Translated by Robert J. Lenardon, 11th ed., Oxford UP, 2019.