A Wild and Domestic Moly
Thom Gunn's Garden
In Book X of The Odyssey, having arrived on a strange island, the eponymous hero sends a company of men out to explore, and they find a dwelling. Outside it, they are greeted by ‘poor bewitched creatures’; wolves and lions tamed by enchantments and drugs. Inside, the goddess-witch Circe sits in her home, singing, and producing beautiful fabrics from her loom. She gathers the men together, laying on a delicious feast for them but, having drugged the food, she whips out her wand and transforms them all into grunting, bristled pigs—herding them away to a pigsty.
Informed of the havoc, Odysseus makes his way down through a charmed grove to Circe’s home, when the god Hermes suddenly appears to him in the guise of a young and beautiful man. Explaining to Odysseus what had happened, Hermes gives the adventurer a plant, moly, with black root and white flower, which no mortal, only a god, can pluck from the ground. The plant gives Odysseus the power to ward off…