Electra by Sally Purcell
(Collected Poems edited by Peter Jay, Anvil)

‘In my dream I stood in a grey land
that had never known tree or sun,
and a little crooked wind blew from nowhere
fretting my hair;
under tarnished heavy clouds
distance or direction were impossible,
no choice could hold meaning.

It was like the salt marshes that creation’s gale
streams across in the blackness before day,
but here there was no sea,
here there could be no dawn.

And I slowly remembered fragments
of a life unimaginably distant,
of a child’s past, in clefts of time’s canyon
freakishly revealed –
my green dress, my toys and games,
all my broken morning

This is everyman's unknown home, they murmured

end of journey for stylite and conquistador –
alone before a tomb in a faceless land.’

All this eternal while Orestes avenger
is hastening down great roads to return to that tomb.

Electra – a character from Greek mythology – is the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Her mother’s lover, Aegisthus, murdered Electra’s father, although it depends on which account one reads because the tales vary: some say Clytemnestra killed her husband, and others say Electra was born of different parents altogether.

Electra saves her brother, Orestes, by sending him to live with an old tutor; they meet up again years later at their father’s tomb when Orestes returns to kill Aegisthus.

In the dream that she shares with us, Electra tells how she stood in a “grey land” which, having never “known tree or sun” cannot be alive; it seems to be a land of emptiness and stagnation, perhaps representing the emotional state to which she was exiled when her father was killed. There is “a little crooked wind” that blows from nowhere, “fretting” her hair. That the breeze has no origin and is somehow “crooked” implies it is deformed, or in some way corrupt; it is symbolic of the events that have propelled her to a place where she has no father.

The “tarnished heavy clouds” could represent the heaviness of her heart, and the fact that distance and direction are unascertainable seems to indicate that life is meaningless, and this is emphasised when she says “no choice could hold meaning”.

The barren land is likened to “salt marshes” that the wind of creation blasts across before the dawn of time, before life took hold. For a moment, it could be a land where life is about to begin, but then she tells us that “here there was no sea,/ here there could be no dawn.” So any hope of life to come is removed; this place is born of the loss of her father and her mother’s murderous betrayal.

Through the images of the surrounding wasteland percolate “slowly remembered fragments” of Electra’s other life – life before murder, life as a child when death had not yet visited. There are the trappings of childhood, the kind of things which, when we remember them for ourselves, poignantly represent a time we cannot get back to, when we were (hopefully) loved and safe. There is a green dress, there are toys – if they are glimpsed in “clefts of time’s canyon” one might imagine they are seen as fossils in the strata of the earth, exposed by a fissure in time’s crust.

There are those who murmur that this is the unknown home of “everyman”. It is unknown by others outside each individual who inhabits it; despite its commonality this is a private place.

The stylite and conquistador for whom this place is the “end of journey” are, respectively, recluses who lived atop high pillars in ancient times (I’d like to know exactly how broad those pillars were at the top), and adventurers or Spanish conquerors.

Electra is standing before a tomb in a landscape that reflects the emotional wasteland she now inhabits; it is her father’s tomb. The last two lines of the poem tell us of Electra’s brother coming to find that tomb and avenge his father’s death. This will be where he meets his sister, because this is the place that possesses her.

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