Finally, the coup de grace, as Eurydice, laughing silently at Orpheus, secretly foretells his brutal murder, occurring some time after his backwards look returns her to the underworld: “They slew the gentle musician, tearing him limb from limb, and flung the severed head into the swift river Hebrus. It was borne along past the river’s mouth…” (Hamilton, 140). Eurydice reveals:

I say this. You abhor my logic, and you shiver,

Thinking I may as well be just some severed head

Floating down a cool forgetful river,

Slipping down the shadows, green and black,

Singing to myself, not looking back.

She seems to take pleasure in this, mocking him and ostensibly describing her own “severed head/floating down a cool forgetful river” while the reference really looks ahead to Orpheus’ demise. More revealing, she is now on her own ‘singing to herself’ no longer subject to the power of his singing. And she is ‘not looking back’ – which mimics and indicts the action of his betrayal, but also declares her new-found fidelity to herself. Possibly her most important strength.

Fidelity is the inflamed ligament connecting “Eurydice Reveals Her Strength” and “Eurydice’s Footnote”. “Eurydice’s Footnote” appears to integrate two streams of rebuke. First, Stallings chides, through Eurydice, the literary authorities as manipulative editors of the truth, imposing a tragic ending on her love story. Second, Stallings allows Eurydice to interpret and berate Orpheus’ action that returned her to death in the underworld.

Tragedy is a literary mechanism through which we confer a dark veneer and contemplative value on death perhaps to undo our fear of its plain, interminable silence. But Stallings, as Eurydice, in a kind of meta, inter-dimensional way, criticizes her authors and their choices that curb her life into a horror of two deaths, supporting this artificial gilding of literature by finessing death into the “more perfect order” of tragedy:

Love…always was a matter of revision

…to poet or politician…

So your artist’s eye…

Refracts discreet components of a beauty

To fix them in some still more perfect order.

That “more perfect order” is tragedy and, in Eurydice’s case, a doubling so at dying twice. One infers a rebuke of the literati in both her words above and with Stallings’s inclusion of the epigraph quoting C.M. Bowra, a British classical scholar and critic in the 1900’s which - in Eurydice’s eyes – may read like a confession. A fuller view of the Bowra article, including the epigraph, follows and seems to expose an editorial decision to commit her tale to tragedy:

“So from the fifth to the first century we have a series of testimonies to a story in which Orpheus succeeded in bringing his wife back from the dead” (Bowra, 1952, p. 120).

“The second stage is represented by a single Hellenistic poem, on which Virgil and Ovid drew freely. No doubt it owed elements to the earlier poems, but it made a vitally important change by turning the recovery of Eurydice, whether complete or temporary, into a tragic loss” (Bowra 1952, p. 125).

Eurydice’s criticism confronts not only the poets, but also, in her eyes, Orpheus’s adjustable desires and fealty. She turns her focus and surmise on the brittle moment of treachery by Orpheus:

Still I recall, at times, the critical moment

When nothing was so difficult as you had wanted,

And knowing my love would grow back for you like any crop,

You turned your head, an inhospitable, cold planet

“When nothing was so difficult as you had wanted” seems not only a challenge to Orpheus’ motivations but suggests an inherent inclination toward ‘greener grass’ and love as casual fare. “love…like any crop”. Now, Orpheus, no longer the melodic hero and savior, becomes the pin of appetite, eschewing the already won and preferring the open opportunity for something else, something better, or at least different: “Life proved fickle as any lover”. And as part of that choice, turns back to Eurydice dismissing her to death in the underworld as his “…eyes—flash, flash, like sickles…” sickles the tool of death.

Finally, it seems both subjects – the literati and Orpheus – are targeted. One can imagine the words of the final tercet and couplet bitten off as they are spoken by Eurydice toward the academics and her betraying lover, the purveyors and causers of her tragedy:

I still imagine your explanation, were it to come

As in some catalogued and hard-bound learned journal

Speaking with 100 iron tongues of respected criticism:

Disappointment in the end was more aesthetic

Than any merely felicitous resolution.

And the “more aesthetic”, for Eurydice, meant being thrown back to the underworld, as these encrusted scholars and her disingenuous lover remove her for the sake of weightier literature and ‘a different crop’, respectively. “Eurydice’s Footnote” is not remorseful but is bitterly critical that she was a pawn for the appetites of nervous poets and critics and, closer to the heart, her song-swelled lover. Outside this diatribe, however, one can imagine Eurydice reverting to her state in “Eurydice Reveals Her Strength” where she is “Singing to myself, not looking back” in the calm of death where our indecipherable, unquiet hollows are no longer at play.