*Looking at my book book, when I read “June Recital” during the springtime, I was interested in Miss Eckhart as a sort of has-been Persephone. . living with her mother, a rape in her youth, and summer and flowers dominant throughout the story. The piano recital is such an interesting scene. . .with the feeling of a pagan festival. She’s a sad, neglected kind of goddess, wishing for the vitality of Virgie.

*Your observation contrasting Joyce and Welty is right on. Davenport makes this point, as well, and writes, “the symbolic content of Miss Welty’s fiction transverses the realistic surface like sound waves, or like starshake against the grain of wood. The effect is that of a moire pattern.”

*Davenport is the perfect reader for Welty, after his years sussing out the meanings in Ezra Pound’s poetry. In “June Recital” he was especially impressed at the appearance of Cupid and Psyche, as the sailor (Kewpie Moffitt) bolts from the house where he’s been making out with Virgie.

*I love Welty’s promiscuous use of Greek mythology. Now it makes me think of Frazer–all the ancient gods and goddesses evolved, merged, split and changed as they were adopted by new cultures or old ideas faded. Perfect that Miss Eckhart is Persephone, Demeter, Arachne, Dido. . .echoes upon echoes.

*Also, for reference, the poem that Cassie keeps thinking of in this story is Yeats’ “The Song of the Wandering Aengus,” in its entirety here: http://www.bartleby.com/146/9.html . This is the source of the title “The Golden Apples.”