The Full Text of “The Three Fates”
The Full Text of “The Three Fates”
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“The Three Fates” Introduction
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Rosemary Dobson’s “The Three Fates” references the Moirai, or Fates, of classical Greek mythology—three sister goddesses who determine people’s destinies by spinning, measuring, and cutting the threads of life. In the poem, a drowning man pleads with the Fates for eternal life. Having been granted his wish, he is forced to relive his past over and over again—but in reverse order. The man suffers greatly, prompting the reader to consider the harm that might come from refusing to accept one’s lot in life. The poem’s narrative structure reflects the man’s destiny, as the audience learns the events of his life from death to birth. “The Three Fates” serves as the title poem and opening work of Dobson’s 1984 collection of poetry, introducing key themes such as art, nature, and mortality.
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“The Three Fates” Summary
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Right as the man was about to drown, he appealed to the three Fates—the three sister goddesses who control destiny. He begged them for eternal life—a request that was a horrible mistake.
The man shot out of the river as though he were a cork submerged in water and then went back to shore. He put on his clothes, in the opposite order from how he'd taken them off, and went back home.
He re-experienced all the extreme suffering and intense emotions he'd felt in life. He wrote poems—working from their last lines to their openings—and wiped away teardrops before he'd even started crying.
As the day moved backwards in time towards the morning, he continued to love a specific woman passionately and without restraint. He looked on as she played on a swing in the garden and became younger and younger, wearing a straw hat and no shoes.
Eventually, both the woman and the swing disappeared, along with the man’s house and the light of day. After a brief pause, the process repeated—the events of his life again unfolding in reverse, from the moment of his drowning in the river.
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“The Three Fates” Themes
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The Permanence of the Past
“The Three Fates” describes a man who begs for eternal life when he realizes that he is about to die. When his wish is granted, the man is forced to relive his time on earth in reverse order, over and over again. Unable to change his past or prevent the suffering that he knows is coming, the man’s wish becomes a kind of curse. The poem thus suggests that it is best to live life well the first time around, as trying to change the past is futile.
After being granted his wish for eternal life, the man must perpetually go through everything he ever experienced—but in reverse. Saved from death by drowning, he shoots out of the river and returns to the shore. He then gets dressed “in reverse order” and proceeds backwards through the events of his life; he composes poetry “from the end backwards” and watches as his beloved “[grows] younger” and the “day [regresses] towards morning” (rather than developing into night). That his life now moves backwards underscores the man’s inability to change the past—there’s no way he can stop anything from happening, because now everything's effect happens before its cause.
As such, the man keeps re-experiencing all the pain and suffering he felt in life, repeatedly undergoing “the enormous agonies of passion” that apparently made him miserable in the first place. The fact that the man attempts to change his destiny indicates that he is unsatisfied with how his life played out, yet—despite having significant misgivings about his life—the man is unable to intervene as he relives these events. Because the man is incapable of removing the sources of his suffering, that suffering becomes inevitable. His inability to change the past makes the man trapped as a perpetual witness to his own pain and shortcomings, left “[b]rushing away tears that ha[ve] not yet fallen.”
Perhaps the most striking example of this misfortune is the fact that he remains unable to hold onto someone he once loved “wildly,” instead losing her again and again. He simply “watch[es]” as she becomes increasingly younger and ultimately disappears.
Once the past is gone, the poem implies, it’s gone forever; there are no do-overs. The man thus seems to look on as everything he cares about—the young woman, “the house and the swing and daylight”—slips out of his reach. The man is apparently caught in this cycle forever, as the events of his life restart “all over,” showing no signs that he might be able to change the outcome. The speaker even calls his attempt to alter his fate “a mistake,” reinforcing the suggestion that perpetually reliving the difficult events of his life causes the man grave pain rather than healing.
Through his story, the speaker suggests that fate is singular and irreversible—there is no way to change one’s destiny, and attempting to do so is unwise. Therefore, it is best to accept one’s fate. Even if one believes in free will and does not take “the three sisters” literally, this message stands—that it is best to live life well as it happens, since in the end, it is impossible to change one’s history.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-15
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Three Fates”
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Lines 1-3
At the instant ...
... Life everlasting.The poem opens by immediately immersing the reader in the action as the speaker describes an unnamed figure "at the instant of drowning." This sets the poem's stakes very high and creates instant drama. The lack of comma where readers would expect one—after the word "drowning"—increases the speed with which this line is read, allowing momentum and anticipation to build and heightening the dramatic impact of the poem's opening. The repeating /t/ sounds—“at the instant [...] sisters”—contribute to the energetic, turbulent atmosphere as well. The /st/ sound also repeats throughout this stanza in "mistake" and "everlasting," the mixture of the sharp /t/ consonance and hissing sibilance creating a sinister tone and vividly evoking the image of the man struggling for his life in the water.
The unnamed man then “invoke[s],” or calls out for, “the three sisters.” Given the poem’s title, the audience can infer that these sisters are the Moirai, or Fates—figures from Greek mythology who control individual destiny. This allusion propels the audience into the world of mythology, which gives the poem an air of splendor and consequence, again heightening its stakes to draw the reader into the storyline. This allusion also subtly signals that the rules that govern the "real world" are suspended within the poem.
The speaker goes on to explain that calling on the Fates was not just "a mistake," but "an aberration," making a correction of sorts to underscore the seriousness of this error. While "mistake" usually indicates a minor or reversible decision, an "aberration" is a severe divergence from an expected course of action, usually with an undesirable outcome. As such, the speaker's careful phrasing stresses that invoking the Moirai is not something that happens often, or perhaps not something that should happen at all.
Lines 2-3 contain the poem’s sole example of enjambment:
It was a mistake, an aberration, to cry out for
Life everlasting.At the end of line 2, the audience understands the gravity of the man's "mistake" but it remains unclear what exactly that mistake was. The line break occurs right before his request is revealed, creating suspense and encouraging the audience to read on. Furthermore, as a result of enjambment, “Life everlasting” makes up its own line, emphasizing the significance of the man's desire for eternal life, which is also his downfall.
The poem's opening stanza also begins to establish the speaker's straightforward, matter-of-fact narration style. The combination of plain language and simple, end-stopped sentences results in a direct manner of speaking that comes across as factual. For instance, the Moirai are simply called "the three sisters," making these grand figures from ancient mythology appear ordinary. In general, by describing the poem's events as if they are normal, the speaker appears self-assured and believable, allowing the reader to accept the fanciful storyline.
Finally, the opening stanza introduces the poem's main organizational feature, namely its organization into tercets. The three lines in each stanza can be seen as a representation of the three sister goddesses, reinforcing their presence in the poem
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Lines 4-6
He came up ...
... to the house. -
Lines 7-9
He suffered the ...
... not yet fallen. -
Lines 10-12
Loving her wildly ...
... Bare-foot, straw-hatted. -
Lines 13-14
And when she ...
... began all over, -
Line 15
The reel unrolling towards the river.
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“The Three Fates” Symbols
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The House
The home is generally a space where people can enjoy privacy, feel safe, and process their experiences and emotions. In many works of literature, home has therefore come to represent security and comfort, as well as a sense of stability and belonging. These symbolic implications are important to the poem.
The man's house first appears after he emerges from the river and gets dressed. Having returned home, he writes poetry and cries, experiencing intense and agonizing "passion." The house gives the man space to fully feel and express his emotions, but it does not exactly provide him any comfort—suggesting, already, that his foolish wish has doomed him and that he cannot, in fact, go home again.
By the end of the poem, the man's house disappears entirely, along with other features that have apparently comforted him throughout his life (the swing in the garden, for example). These losses reflect the total loss of security and stability that the home represents. Reliving his life in reverse means watching everything that he has loved and worked for slip away over and over again.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 6: “Returned to the house.”
- Line 13: “And when she was gone and the house and the swing and daylight”
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Times of Day
Within the poem, the various times of day represent various phases of life. In the poem's third stanza, the man lovingly watches a young woman as she frolics in a garden. Both of them gradually become younger and younger "as the day regresse[s] towards morning." When the man reaches the very beginning of his life, everything disappears, including "daylight" itself.
The reader can thus infer that the poem "begins" at night, here symbolic of middle of old age. The man experiences emotional torment (or "suffer[s] the enormous agonies of passion") during his later years. Because his life moves backwards, the man experiences the heavy burdens of adulthood—the darkness of night—before the beauty and promise of youth (the brightness of "morning"). When the whole cycle starts over again, "daylight" (here, youth) disappears—signalling a return to the darkness representing of the man's later years as the cycle starts all over again. In addition to simply illustrating that the man now moves backwards through his life, the times of day also enhance the poem's atmosphere of regret, disappointment, and loss.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 10: “Loving her wildly as the day regressed towards morning”
- Line 13: “And when she was gone and the house and the swing and daylight”
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The Swing
The man's beloved is first pictured "swinging in the garden"—a classic image that represents the innocence and joy of youth. The speaker further describes the girl as "bare-foot" and "straw-hatted," contributing to the idea that, for her, the carefree wonder and happiness of childhood are in, well, full swing.
But because time moves backwards within the poem, the girl gets younger and younger, until eventually, both she and the swing disappear. This represents the loss of innocence and joy, which the man could not hold onto despite having "[l]ife everlasting."
This would be the second time this happened, of course: the man ostensibly lost his innocence the first time around when he grew up and became an adult. Now, even growing backwards can't preserve the magic of childhood. The swing helps the audience envision the fleeting beauty of youth, better understanding how torturous it must be for the man to watch it escape him once again.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 11-12: “He watched her swinging in the garden, growing younger, / Bare-foot, straw-hatted.”
- Line 13: “And when she was gone and the house and the swing and daylight”
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“The Three Fates” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Allusion
This poem contains allusions to figures from Greek mythology, most notably the Moirai, or Fates, after whom the poem is titled. The Fates are three sister goddesses who are said to control individual destiny, which is represented by the thread of life. Clotho’s task is to spin the thread, selecting the moment of one’s birth; Lachesis controls the course and length of one’s life by measuring the thread; and Atropos clips the thread, determining the moment and means of one’s death.
The Moirai command a great deal of respect because their decisions are both highly consequential and irrefutable. They make compromises for no one, and in most accounts, even the most powerful gods cannot reverse their judgments. Tending to operate in the background, when the Fates do appear in the main action of myths, such stories generally reinforce their ultimate power—and by extension, the irreversibility of one's destiny.
The Moirai are directly referenced in the poem's title, where they are referred to as "The Three Fates," and first line, where they are simply called "the three sisters." But their influence doesn't end there. After they grant the man’s wish for everlasting life, their presence is felt throughout the poem as the audience watches the consequences of their judgment unfold.
The poem's final stanza contains an allusion to another well-known mythological figure: when the audience learns that the man’s life repeats in reverse once again, this process is compared to "the reel unrolling towards the river." This image recalls the story of Sisyphus, an infamously crafty king who angered Zeus.
Depending on which version of the story you read, either Thanatos (the personification of Death) or Hades (the god of Death) visits Sisyphus on behalf of Zeus, intending to capture him and bring him to the Underworld. However, Sisyphus tricks Thanatos/Hades into demonstrating how the restraints work, leaving him chained up instead of Sisyphus. As punishment, Sisyphus is condemned to push a boulder uphill for all eternity. Each time it reaches the top of the hill, the boulder rolls back down and he must begin again.
The circular reel “unrolling” towards its starting point—“the river”—subtly evokes Sisyphus’s similar eternal fate. This allusion suggests that, like Sisyphus, the man was punished for attempting to cheat Death and save himself from the afterlife. The reel here also gestures again towards the Moirai and their spool of thread.
In ancient Greece, myths were used to explain natural phenomena and other aspects of life that were mysterious or unknown. They also helped establish, communicate, and preserve cultural ideals, educating people about their society’s values and the proper way to conduct oneself. This poem's allusions to mythology draw on such traditions, signaling that there is a larger lesson to be gleaned from the man’s story.
By propelling the audience into the world of mythology, the allusions also allow readers to suspend conventional lines of reasoning, leaving room for the poem's unusual storyline. The mythic atmosphere also gives the poem a sense of grandeur and consequence, despite the very ordinary man that it follows. Perhaps this allows readers to relate to the man and therefore see themselves within such myths. As such, modern audiences are invited to partake in ancient explorations of such subjects as fate, death, and regret.
Where allusion appears in the poem:- Line 1: “the three sisters”
- Lines 14-15: “it began all over, / The reel unrolling towards the river”
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Assonance
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Asyndeton
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Consonance
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End-Stopped Line
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Metaphor
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Parataxis
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Polysyndeton
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Simile
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"The Three Fates" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Invoke
- The three sisters
- Aberration
- Agonies
- Regressed
- Reel
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(Location in poem: Line 1: “he invoked the three sisters”)
Summoned, usually as an appeal for assistance.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Three Fates”
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Form
This poem does not fit into a traditional form like a sonnet or ballad. However, it is carefully structured according to its own set of rules. Its 15 lines are broken up into five tercets, with their three-line format subtly recalling the three Fates. In this way, the presence of the sister goddesses is felt in each stanza of the poem, reinforcing the fact that they control the man’s destiny.
Each tercet can be seen as a particular moment or episode from the man’s life—from the instant of death to his birth. The consistent three-line structure highlights the repetitive nature of the man’s experience and thus calls attention to his inability to change the past as he relives it.
Fittingly, each stanza is made up of a complete sentence (with the first stanza made up of two sentences). This format gives the impression of separate events arranged in a sequence. As such, the format helps the reader track the man’s life as it moves in reverse, making the poem’s narrative easier to follow. At the same time, there are no transitional words such as “next” or “then.” The fragmentation of the poem’s events into separate stanzas combined with the sense of equality among those stanzas suggests that the events could happen in any order. In this way, the reader is encouraged to consider what the man’s life would have been like the first time around (from birth until death), as well as in reverse.
Finally, in general, the lines within each stanza become progressively shorter, in terms of their appearance on the page. As the man proceeds backwards through life, he becomes younger and watches all that has brought him joy, hope, and comfort slip away. The gradually dwindling lines create a visual illustration of loss and the man’s movement backwards in time. The only slight deviations from this structure occur in stanzas 3 ("He suffered [...] fallen") and 4 ("Loving her [...] hatted."), which describe the man’s intense emotions. The unpredictable line lengths express his inner turmoil at these moments.
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Meter
This poem does not follow a stable pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, or meter. Instead, the flexible, free verse nature of this poem allows the speaker's cadence to shift in accordance with its events—reinforcing important images and ideas, maintaining interest, and ultimately giving the reader a more vivid picture of the man’s experience.
For instance, line 11 features an iambic (da-DUM) meter:
He watched her swinging in the garden, growing younger,
The alternating unstressed and stressed syllables create a sing-song effect that recalls a nursery rhyme, strengthening the image of youthful joy and innocence. Plus, the repeated rises and falls of the speaker's cadence mimic the act of swinging. A similar effect occurs in line 4, which contains a repeating anapest (da-da-DUM):
He came up like a cork and back to the river-bank,
Here, the high concentration of unstressed syllables quickens the pace and exaggerates the stresses, which seem to burst forth, much like the man who emerges from the water and bobs along.
Interestingly, in a few places, the rhythm settles into a pattern of alternating stressed and unstressed syllables, only to be inverted when the speaker mentions that the man's life moves in reverse. Here is a look at line 5:
Put on his clothes in reverse order,
In this case, the metrical pattern literally "reverse[s] order" at the end on the line, subtly reinforcing the implication that the man now moves through his life backwards.
While the poem's form—and in particular the consistent use of tercets—might be said to reflect the repetitive nature of the man's experience, variations in meter make individual episodes of his life more vivid and unpredictable for the reader. In this way, the constantly changing rhythm also expresses the chaos of being thrust into this "new normal" wherein the man must relive a wide range of experiences and emotions.
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Rhyme Scheme
This poem is written in free verse and thus does not feature a rhyme scheme. Coupled with the inconsistent meter and the speaker’s plain language, the lack of rhyme gives the poem a prose-like feel, almost as if the speaker is relaying a news story or myth to the audience. The inclusion of a rhyme scheme would likely give the poem a more lighthearted atmosphere, clashing with the man's painful experiences. Instead, the lack of rhyme contributes to the sense of chaos and disharmony, reflecting the man's inability to resolve his past.
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“The Three Fates” Speaker
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The speaker is not directly involved in the poem's events, nor does the speaker offer personal reactions to those events. As such, the speaker appears to be a third party who looks on as the poem’s events unfold—or is somehow otherwise aware of them—and later relates them to the reader. The speaker's use of everyday language and past-tense verbs is consistent with this physical and emotional removal from the man's experience. For instance, line 1 simply reads:
At the instant of drowning he invoked the three sisters.
The straightforward narration style makes the mythical storyline feel "real" to the reader and contributes to the speaker's credibility.
The audience learns no biographical information about the speaker over the course of the poem, and due to the lack of personal input, very little can be inferred from the text. In ancient Greece, poets and storytellers would recount myths in the style of the day. Given this poem's classical subject matter, the anonymous speaker can be taken as one such storyteller, reimagined for a modern audience.
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“The Three Fates” Setting
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Over the course of the poem, the speaker describes a river, a garden, and a young girl who frolics about while barefoot. As such, the poem appears to be set in an idyllic countryside. However, the descriptions are highly generalized ("the garden," "the river-bank"), so the poem could theoretically take place anywhere in the world, at any point in history. Such a nondescript setting allows an array of readers to picture themselves in the man's place, thus making his story more universally relatable.
In general, the man's rural surroundings—complete with a river, a swing, and greenery—come across as quite pleasant. However, the picturesque setting gains a darker undercurrent when the audience learns more about the suffering that has taken place there. For instance, the river is the site of the man's death, while the garden is tinged with regret as the man wishes for more time with the female figure who slowly slips away from him. In fact, all of the pleasant features of the landscape eventually disappear as time passes. As such, they might be seen as representations of the pleasurable and hopeful aspects of his life, which he is forced to watch vanish.
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Three Fates”
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Literary Context
"The Three Fates" opens Rosemary Dobson’s 1984 collection of poetry, also serving as its titular work. By this point in her career, Dobson had written about a dozen poetry collections, establishing a strong and consistent literary voice.
Dobson's work often focuses on themes such as mortality, mythology, and the natural world, and featured a distinct narration style. Her speakers are generally restrained, meditative, and observant, but still able to convey the passion and emotion of their subjects. They tend to take a descriptive and exploratory approach, rather than overtly offering a specific lesson or belief to the reader.
Dobson's poetry also often explores the intersections of visual art and literature. In fact, the title poem of her earliest collection, In a Convex Mirror (1944), was inspired by painter Jan Van Eyck’s acclaimed Arnolfini Portrait (1434). Dobson was particularly drawn to the Old Masters and frequently adopted subjects that European artists have engaged with for centuries.
In this poem and others, Dobson reimagines ancient Greek myths for the modern reader. Dobson was known for utilizing traditional poetic forms, but altering them, or perhaps "relaxing" their rigid molds. By reimagining both beloved myths and revered forms, Dobson put herself in conversation with great writers from history, aligning herself with ancient Greek masters such as Homer (The Odyssey) and Hesiod (Theogony), as well as more contemporary poets who have kept such storytelling traditions alive and relevant—for instance, the Greek poets C.P. Cavafy and Giorgos Seferis, and venerated English-language writers like John Keats ("Ode on a Grecian Urn"), Alfred Lord Tennyson ("Ulysses"), and T. S. Eliot ("The Waste Land"). The Moirai, in particular, have been the subject of poems by such writers as Lord Byron ("To Anne: Oh, Say Not, Sweet Anne") and Henry David Thoreau ("Though All The Fates").
As the granddaughter of English poet and essayist Austin Dobson, Dobson was born into a literary family. Her friends included fellow Australian poets Francis Webb and Nan McDonald, as well as artist and writer Norman Lindsay, the latter of whom shared Dobson’s enthusiasm for fusing classical subjects with Australian landscapes. Dobson is probably most closely associated with Australian writer David Campbell, and the two collaborated on translations—or what they called "imitations"—of Russian poetry.
Finally, Dobson is known to ponder those evasive and unknowable aspects of life. In the preface to her 1973 Selected Poems, Dobson described her own work as "part of a search for something only fugitively glimpsed.... a doomed but urgent wish to express the inexpressible."
Historical Context
Dobson’s poetry tends not to explicitly deal with the specific social, cultural, or political conditions of her time. Instead, her work generally meditates on aspects of the human experience that people have pondered for centuries. Dobson was also known to reimagine ancient myths within Australian landscapes. As such, her poetry reveals the universality of questions about such subjects as life and death, fate and free will, and regret and acceptance.
Dobson published "The Three Fates" in 1984, when Australia was in the midst of an economic boom. Financial worry is absent from the poem, but the man it describes still has a literal eternity of hardships ahead of him. Perhaps by offering this poem in a time of growth and greed, Dobson reminded her audience that joy, beauty, grief, and mystery are constants in life—from antiquity until today—even when other factors fluctuate.
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More “The Three Fates” Resources
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External Resources
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Biography of the Poet — An overview of Dobson's life, with a bibliography and recordings of the poet reading her works aloud.
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Sisyphus’s Punishment — Read up on the crafty king who cheated Death and was punished for all eternity.
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Dobson's Creative Influences — Learn more about Dobson's engagement with other writers and visual artists, including their impact on her poetry.
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Who Are the Three Sisters? — Familiarize yourself with the Moirai (or Fates), the Greek sister goddesses who inspired Dobson's poem. This brief article includes a discussion of their role in Greek mythology as well as examples of their depiction in art.
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Read the Collection Online — Access Dobson’s full 1984 poetry collection that is titled after “The Three Fates” and opens with the poem.
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