Penelope

I wrote earlier about Edwin Muir and his astonishing (near incomprehensible) rise from obscure poverty to literary eminence. Among many other talents, he had a poet's knack for achieving resonance with his past, including his literary or cultural past. There's nothing here about abstruse scholarship: just a bit of reading and a natural feel for the material. Like this:

Sole at the house's heart, Penelope
Sat at her chosen task, endless undoing
Of endless doing, endless weaving, unweaving,
In the clean chamber. Still her loom ran empty
Day after day. She thought: 'Here I do nothing
Or less than nothing, making an emptiness
Amid disorder, weaving, unweaving the lie
The day demands. Odysseus, this is duty,
To do and undo, to keep a vacant gate
Where order and right and hope and peace can enter.'

--Edwin Muir, The Return of Odysseus