A Supermarket in California carried the dead into the underworld, across the river Styx. The River Lethe was a different river in the underworld, which caused those who drank its waters to experience complete forgetfulness. The shades of the dead were required to drink the waters of the Lethe in order to forget their earthly life. In "Story Line", Ian Marshall suggests that the poem is written to show the differences in American life depicted by Whitman and that which faces Ginsberg in the 1950s: "It's the distance of a century—with Civil War and the 'triumph' of the Industrial Revolution and Darwinism and Freud
What the Water Gave Me (painting) other was Diego." Their stormy relationship survived infidelities, the pressures of careers, divorce, remarriage, Frida’s bisexual affairs, her health issues, and her inability to bear children. Of her 200 some paintings, drawings, and sketches throughout her life, she related many to physical and emotional pain. She mirrored all of this hurt into "What the Water Gave Me". The painting references traditional and ancient iconography, mythology and symbolism, eroticism and botany all mapped out onto a scene depicting the legs of the artist herself (as signified by her wounded right foot) submerged in bath water. References to Kahlo's earlier works and