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This is an excellent updating of one of mythology's most bitter legends, a woman's destruction of what she loves most for the sake of revenge. Everybody understands Medea, but nobody likes her; sympathy is possible only if the reader remembers that her murder of her brother, her betrayal of her father and native country, all her acts of violence to benefit Jason, are the results of "Aphrodite's interference"--the blinding effects of passion. The story, as Euripides tells it, uses all of the forces that work on the central characters; the desire for power and wealth, parental affection, the need to be vindicated in the public mind, the fundamental need to "get even."
This retelling uses today's language and the media as an instrument. The fatuousness of "the upper echelons of life" echoes the man's ambition and self-satisfaction; the "well-hones butcher's knife" conveys his duplicity and underlying brutality and opportunism.
In the sestet we enter Medea's mind, as the chorus of the play would have done upon hearing her thoughts. She justifies herself: she "made" him; she is childless because of him--a wonderful twist on the original, in which she ultimately makes herself childless!--and she must bear the grief and idignity of seeing his children with a younger wife. Now she prepares to "kill" that whole "royal family" on the very day of his political success--by informing the media of certain aspects of his past the we are not told, but that we can imagine.
Should we be told? Does it matter what the details are that she's going to spill to the press? I don't think so; I rather like inventing my own political scandal about him, to go with the story of his sexual involvement with her. I have no doubt, though, that he' going to spill more than just sex: he did "overcome all obstacles," and that's an ominous phrase. The suggestion of his "early hardship" is a stroke of genius: it arouses sympathy for him, but also hints at his capacity to use trouble as a ladder.
Only one line in this excellent sonnet raises any questions, and it's line 12. The phrase "were seen" feels rhyme-driven, and ought to be easy to change to something stronger. I thought of "The children she had wanted stood between/their father and his wife, proudly displayed." That may involve replacing the "between" in line one with something else; does anyone have thoughts about that?
This poems makes me want to shout hurrah for the sonnet, a form that can do just about anything except slice and dice vegetables.
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