Myth

The key to this poem, I think, is the word “Erebus.”  It is defined as “the dark region beneath the earth through which the dead must pass before they reach Hades.”  She uses the phrase “the Erebus I keep you in” twice.  Tretheway is trying to say that her mother is forced to stay in Erebus, or some kind of purgatory.  Purgatory is a place where one pays for their sins, and the soul of Tretheway’s mother, while perhaps not paying for her sins, is being forced to die again and again.  Tretheway also says that she is constantly “forsaking” her mother, which could also feel like a punishment to the mother’s soul.  For Tretheway herself, this is also a torturous exercise.  An air of guilt is present throughout the poem.  She feels guilty for continally forsaking her, for being asleep while she was dying, for letting her “slip through the rift… between her slumber and her waking.”  Tretheway also has to go through losing her mother over and over again.  Each night, in her dreams, she feels like she has her mother again, and when she wakes up, her mother is gone.  Each morning she feels that loss.  Also, each night when she goes to sleep, she knows that she is going to resurrect her mother, then lose her again, and have to feel the loss and the grief anew.  It’s a torturous exercise for both Tretheway and her mother’s soul, but she find she can’t keep herself from continually dreaming about her mother, something that is also frustrating, but probably that she doesn’t want to give up, because when she stops dreaming about her mother, she will lose her for good.