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In Classical Greek, Lethe (Λήθη; , ) literally means "forgetfulness" or "concealment" and is related to the Greek word for "truth": ''a-lethe-ia'' (αλήθεια), meaning "un-forgetfulness" or "un-concealment". The River Lethe in Greek Mythology has appeared many times in popular culture since the times of ancient Greece. ==Poetry== Walter Savage Landor transforms into substance the metaphor that time takes flight when he places a few drops of Lethe's waters on wing: On love, on grief, on every human thing, In ''The Divine Comedy'', the stream of Lethe flows to the centre of the earth from its surface, but its headwaters are located in the Earthly Paradise found at the top of the mountain of Purgatory. Souls about to enter Heaven drink from it to forget their sins. In John Keats' poem, "Ode on Melancholy", the first line begins "No, no! Go not to Lethe". In his ''Ode to a Nightingale'' the "Lethe-wards" are said to have sunk into the narrator and created a "drowsy numbness". The fourth stanza of the fourth canto of Byron's "Don Juan" reads:
In his poem "The Sleeper," Edgar Allan Poe describes a 'sleeping' "universal valley" that includes a Lethe-like body of water.
Charles Baudelaire's poem "Spleen" ends with the lines Baudelaire also wrote a poem entitled "Le Léthé" ("Lethe"), in which an adored but cruel woman serves as a metaphor for the oblivion of the river Lethe. French Romantic poet Alphonse de Lamartine refers to the Lethe river in "Le Vallon" (The Vale)
Pushkin's verse novel "Eugene Onegin" also contains three separate references to the Lethe (Лета) including this most poignant one in Lensky's soliloquy in Chapter 6, Stanza XXII as he awaits his fate at the dueling ground:
In Hymn to Proserpine (1866) by Algernon Charles Swinburne, the line "We have drunken of things Lethean..." laments the decline of pagan tradition and beliefs in ancient Rome following the endorsement of Christianity as the official religion. The river is also mentioned in at least one of the poems of Victorian classicist and poet A.E. Housman (XXIII from More Poems).
Here the role of the Lethe as the final barrier to be crossed before reaching Elysium is invoked (NB "Lethe" is better rhyme for "ferry" than is "Stix") and the poem as a whole seems to reflect the associations of the Lethe with forgetfulness and escape from ones former life. The Edna St. Vincent Millay poem "Lethe" describes the river as
In "The Scarlet Woman", a poem by African-American poet Fenton Johnson (1888–1958), a young woman resorts to prostitution in order to avoid starvation. The poem concludes with the lines
Sylvia Plath has alluded to Lethe in multiple poems, particularly in those written for ''Ariel''. For example, both "Amnesiac" (21 October 1962) and "Getting There" (6 November 1962)〔''The Collected Poems / Sylvia Plath'' (ISBN 0-06-090900-5)〕 reference the river: "Getting There" ends with the lines
while the final stanza of "Amnesiac" ends with
The river Lethe is mentioned in Allen Ginsberg's poem "A Supermarket in California".
Billy Collins, in his poem "Forgetfulness", refers to
in "Sonnet V: To the River Downs" Charlotte Smith asks the river Lethe for forgetfulness:
Also mentioned in Byron's poem "Remember Thee! Remember Thee!". In the Aeneid by Vergil, in book 6 Aeneas sees the future Roman heroes drinking from the River Lethe. "The drink the soothing fluid and long forgetfullness" Emily Dickinson mentions the "Lethe" in her poetry (#1730 by Thomas Johnson editing). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「River Lethe in popular culture」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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