For the first time we look at Orpheus's great love for Eurydice that would compel him to undertake a journey into the underworld as something different. For perhaps the first time we see within this tale a man who wants to possess and to control, to confirm who he is by her presence. What at one time may have seemed a classic love story is no more. A very interesting concept to think of the poet as seeking to provide women with a source of stength through the retelling of male myths, to provide the reader with an image of woman as more than a prop and a victim. It is not the man who provides her with strength, but from within herself that she finds it.
Romantic thralldom is an all-encompassing, totally defining love between unequals. . .
H.D. was trying to construct some perspective that avoided the constant subordination of the woman to the man in normal and cultural life. In her view, men and women are equals in the spiritual realm, not seeking the distinctions of fixed sex roles, but rather a mutual suffusion of insight and wisdom. Harper Collins Publishers. Salem Press, New Jersey. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable 15th ed.