Hades To Persephone By Lee Ann Shaffer

Love is a double-edged sword. It can be mutual between both partners or leave one heartbroken. As seen in "Hades to Persephone" by Lee Ann Schaffer and Love by Paul-Albert Besnard, both pieces inquire about the idea of desperate longing by demonstrating contrasting concepts of pathos and chiaroscuro.

To begin, the speaker in “Hades to Persephone” uses pathos to instill pity in the audience for Hades’ one-sided desperate longing while in Love, pathos is utilized to demonstrate how the couple’s longing for each other is shared between them. The poem, “Hades to Persephone”, describes how Hades pleads to Persephone for her to “Convince [him] that [she] want to be here; / It’s not [his] trick that keeps [her] so near. / [She] chose [him]. [She]

Hades’ diction states how he longs for Persephone to choose him and be with him, implying that she does not want to be with him and wants to return to her mother. However, in Love, the artist’s use of pathos establishes how the couple’s desperate longing for each other is a positive outcome as “the woman embraces the man; both seemed to have awaited this embrace as shown by the intensity of their grasps. The piece depicts how deeply the couple is in love” (Besnard). The way that the subjects are drawn conveys the positive emotions that are mutual between the two, so the use of pathos depicts the couple’s desperate longing for each other, commonly shared between them as the audience senses the overwhelming joy of the couple's reunion. Unlike Hades and Persophone’s relationship,

It’s commonly known for Hades to be depicted as the darkness of death while Persephone is the light of all things peaceful such as flowers and spring. So when Hades wanted “...to believe [Persephone] had the choice; / [and that he] was hearing more than [his] own voice”, he was trying to convince himself that what he was doing was not wicked (Schaffer 6-7). The speaker uses chiaroscuro to convey how Hades’s desperate longing for Persephone caused his darkness to take control of him and lead him to do anything to make her, his. Hades wanted Persephone to be his light, but not being able to bear the rejection he took her anyway and tries to convince himself that the darkness that led him to commit the wicked deed, was her kind light that chose Hades and that he didn’t let his darkness dominate him. On the other hand, in Love, there is shown to be “more light in the painting than dark, and how the man is lighter than the door frame behind him while the woman is lit up with light” (Besnard). The artist’s use of chiaroscuro in the piece shows how the woman’s light is being spread to the man, giving him happiness and hope while she shares his burdens by taking some of his darkness. The artist intentionally put the woman on the lighter side to