“Memorial: A Version of Homer’s Iliad” by Alice Oswald

This is a retelling of the Iliad cut to the bone by Oswald. She explains, “This translation presents the whole poem as a kind of cemetery.” Her poem begins, “The first to die was PROTESILAUS/ A focused man who hurried to darkness/ With forty black ships leaving the land behind/ Men sailed with him from those flower-lit cliffs/ Where the grass gives growth to everything/ Pyrasus    Iton    Pteleus    Antron/ He died in mid-air jumping to be the first ashore… He’s been in the black earth now for thousands of years” Throughout the poem, Oswald never sugarcoats the brutality of war. “Meanwhile Diomedes/ Seeing through everything to its inner emptiness/ Killed ECHEMMON killed CHROMIUS/ Tin-opened them out of their armour/ And took for himself their high-stepping horses” Frequently interspersed throughout the death roll, Oswald makes use of repetition through pastoral lyric. “Like an oak struck by lightening/ Throws up its arms and burns/ Terrifying for a man out walking/ To smell that sulfur smell/ And see the fields flickering ahead of him/ Lit up blue by the strangeness of god” A single line often conveys mood through simile. “With weapons cleaned and layed down like cutlery” At points, she abstracts from the particular deaths to pontificate on the nature of war. “Grief is black it is made of earth/ It gets into the cracks in the eyes/ It lodges its lump in the throat/ When a man sees his brother on the ground/ He goes mad he comes running out of nowhere” All the scenes depicting the battlefield of Ilium cast it as a cursed spot. “But this is it now this is the mud of Troy/ This is black wings coming down every evening/ Bird’s feathers on your face/ Unmaking you mouthful by mouthful/ Eating your eyes your open eyes/ Which your mother should have closed” In the constant refrain of death, the soldiers all are eventually cut down to size. “DOLOPS the strongest of Lampus/ Not believing he could die/ Even when his spear hit solid metal/ And banged back again/ Even when a man hacked off his helmet/ And he saw his own eye-holes/ Staring up at him from the ground/ It was not until the beak of death/ Pushed out through his own chest/ That he recognized the wings of darkness”