Speaking a Cemetery: On Alice Oswald’s Memorial and Homer’s Iliad
In 2011, Alice Oswald withdrew Memorial from the shortlist for the T.S. Eliot Prize in protest. Having recently lost its public funding, the prize was rescued by the sponsorship of an investment company specializing in hedge funds. Oswald indicted the company’s lack of transparency and undefined ethical values, positioned herself with the “people crying out for change…rather than with Aurum.” [1] The irony of a classicist rejecting the patronage of a company whose name means “gold” in Latin is further intensified by the polarized responses to Oswald’s statement in The Guardian. One commenter, username EvilCapitalist, railed: “Don’t be so ludicrously precious. T.S. Eliot himself worked in a bank for a long time.” [2]
Poetry’s complicity in the market is, of course, nothing new. The patronage model undergirded poetic production for centuries, and critics still argue whether Virgil’s passionate patriotism was sincerely meant, an elaborate satiric ruse, or self-preserving, imperial pandering. Ovid’s banishment from Rome after his carmen et error (a poem and a mistake) bitterly reveals the fate of a poet who falls out of favor with power, whether that power be global finance capitalism or an authoritarian emperor. On the other hand, there is a long history of poets, especially female poets, resisting the commodification of their work through publication; we can think of Anne Bradstreet’s lament that her “unfit” book was “snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true, / Who thee abroad, exposed to public view” or Emily Dickinson’s letter to Higginson after someone published “The Snake” without her consent: “I had told you I did not print.” [3]
Although Oswald willingly published Memorial, she exercises her power of dissent by withdrawing it from a competition that she considered ethically unsound. I find Oswald’s decision to protest by removing herself (and her work) from the competition oddly reminiscent of the opening conflict of Homer’s Iliad, Oswald’s chosen site of creative excavation. After giving up his war prize—the daughter of Apollo’s priest—to quell a plague on his army, Agamemnon insists,
The prize, the beauteous prize, I will resign,
So dearly valued, and so justly mine.
But since for common good I yield the fair,
My private loss let grateful Greece repair; [4]
He seeks to repair this private loss by seizing Achilles’ own beloved war prize, Briseis. Wrath kindled, Achilles calls Agamemnon a tyrant and is only prevented from a murderous revenge by Athena’s staying hand. When the avenue of violence is closed to him, Achilles adopts a policy of inaction and withdraws himself and his men from Agamemnon’s host:
What cause have I to war at thy decree
The distant Trojans never injured me. …
But know, proud monarch, I’m thy slave no more;
My fleet shall waft me to Thessalia’s shore. [5]
Achilles refuses to continue working (i.e., killing) under Agamemnon’s abusive rule. He chooses to remove himself from the narrative of the Trojan War, giving up his kleos (honor, glory) and consigning himself to the oblivion of an eventless life in Thessaly. Of course, even a new reader of Homer knows this cannot last: Achilles’ name is “familiar in [our] mouths as household words.” [6]
Yet in Oswald’s long poem, Memorial, Achilles’ name appears a mere three times. (Four if you count the Library of Congress subject headings on the copyright page: 1. Homer. Iliad–Poetry. 2. Achilles (Greek mythology)–Poetry). Oswald strips away the meta-narrative of Homer’s epic, preserving only the biographies of the war’s victims and the epic similes that translate the horror of their deaths. Because Achilles’ own death occurs outside the scope of Homer’s poem, he is not included among the victims Oswald memorializes, yet his deadly presence hovers among the lines; he is signified metonymically as the “spear [that] found out the little patch of white / Between [Hector’s] collarbone and his throat.” [7]
Memorial is built on the
carefully columned mason-work of two hundred names that appear on the poem’s first pages. The names are carried
through the poem with the capitalization of each victim’s name at the moment of
his death. The first two times Achilles is mentioned, it is in connection to
the sons of Priam that he first kidnapped, then later encountered and killed on
the battlefield. Oswald’s description of the death of Lycaon is particularly
tender, repeating his name in a frenzied burst of anaphora:
Oswald gives us Lycaon’s story in just a few short lines: his brush with death being captured by Achilles, his unexpected freedom on being bought out of slavery, and his desperate end just twelve days after his release by the very man who had captured him. The rushing surge of Lycaon’s life, quickened by Oswald’s lyric energy, slams into the wall of a single name’s refusal: Achilles No. Yet by uttering his and the other heroes’ names so seldomly, Oswald seeks to dignify and elegize the men whose bodies were merely counted as evidence of another hero’s aristeia. The death of Patroclus—“Who grew up blurred under the background noise / Of his foster-brother’s voice” (60)—is illuminated by “a rare and immediate light” that leaves Achilles (and his name) in shadow.
LYCAON killed Lycaon unkilled Lycaon
Bending down branches to make wheels
Lycaon kidnapped Lycaon pruning by moonlight
Lycaon naked in a river pleading for his life
Being answered by Achilles No (66)
Oswald gives us Lycaon’s story in just a few short lines: his brush with death being captured by Achilles, his unexpected freedom on being bought out of slavery, and his desperate end just twelve days after his release by the very man who had captured him. The rushing surge of Lycaon’s life, quickened by Oswald’s lyric energy, slams into the wall of a single name’s refusal: Achilles No. Yet by uttering his and the other heroes’ names so seldomly, Oswald seeks to dignify and elegize the men whose bodies were merely counted as evidence of another hero’s aristeia. The death of Patroclus—“Who grew up blurred under the background noise / Of his foster-brother’s voice” (60)—is illuminated by “a rare and immediate light” that leaves Achilles (and his name) in shadow.
Oswald describes Memorial as “a kind of oral cemetery—in the aftermath of the Trojan War, an attempt to remember people’s names and lives without
the use of
writing” (ix-x). These claims to orality seem impossible to the reader grasping
the pages of a very material object, but it doesn’t take long for Memorial’s voice to ring out like the blind bard himself. Oswald’s affinity for the
oral tradition harmonizes with her resistance to accepting complicit patronage.
Unlike the fraught manuscripts of Virgil’s Aeneid, Homer’s oral epics
have a democratizing mobility and a sense of contingency. Oral poetry offers an
escape from the materiality of the marketplace and entrance into an aural world
of unfettered movement. Oswald aligns her poem with these values, calling oral
poetry “never stable but always adapting itself to a new audience, as if its
language, unlike written language, was still alive and kicking” (x). Her
adaptation of the Iliad strips away the narrative of its petty
power-mongers and stitches together what remains—men who have been swept up
in another man’s fight: “And HECTOR died like everyone else” (68).
Memorial is made up of a succession of mini-biographies alternating with pairs of identically repeated similes. Oswald claims her “bipolar” poem generically draws “the similes from pastoral lyric…[and] the biographies from the Greek tradition of lament poetry” (ix). Each of these poetic traditions has an oral element, but Oswald heightens the effect still further by repeating each of her similes a second time on the facing page. This structure comes, in part, from the antiphonal exchanges between poets and mourning women, between shepherd-poets singing of lost friends, and between sections of the chorus in Greek theater. However, exact repetition is actually most common in the Homeric tradition, in which similes are repeated verbatim in various parts of the poem. The repetitions, like epithets, are designed to help with memorization, but also to give the poet a chance to catch his breath or even compose the next section of the poem. (A similar tradition continues today in freestyle rap). The Iliad, in its canonized and physical form, probably has fewer repeated similes than the orally performed version would have had, but five identical repetitions remain in the text. [8] One memorable pair of repetitions straddles Books 9 and 16; the same figure is used to describe both Agamemnon tearfully addressing his troops after the Trojans have reached the Greek ships and Patroclus asking Achilles to let him rejoin the fight as the ships burn:
They took their seats in assembly, dispirited, and Agamemnon
stood up before them, shedding tears, like a spring dark-running
that down the face of a rock impassable drips its dim water.
…So he spoke, and all of them stayed stricken to silence. [9]
Meanwhile Patroklos came to the shepherd of the people, Achilleus,
and stood by him and wept warm tears, like a spring dark-running
that down the face of a rock impassable drips its dim water;
and swift-footed brilliant Achilleus looked on him in pity, [10]
The repeated image—seemingly interchangeable—has vastly different effects: Agamemnon’s tears are met with silence, then dissent, Patroclus’ with pity, then permission.
Readers may not physically need a breath while reading Memorial, but Oswald’s simile offer a brief inhalation of uncluttered air, away from the violence of the battlefield. “Grief is black it is made of earth / It gets into the cracks in the eyes / It lodges its lump in the throat” (35). But Oswald’s similes transfer us to a world of vision and movement; like Homer’s similes, they distill a single gesture. In this way, Oswald offers a figurative reprieve: the terminally ill man whose journey to Troy was “a kind of suicide” is
Like a stallion tugging at a rope breaks loose at last …
When he holds his head high and runs like a king
Under the wind-blown banner of his mane
Then he knows his knees are going to lift him forever
And a grassy cloth has been spread on the fields for his pleasure. (48)
By the second time through, we can feel the glorious wind of the beyond and the soft sod of the Elysian fields in the ringing couplet of “forever” and “pleasure.” Many of Oswald’s similes are repurposed descriptions of Homer’s heroes; in the Iliad, the stallion simile appears twice: once as Paris joyfully leaves home for battle (before his shame) and again as Hector, inspired by Apollo, confidently pushes his men towards the coast (before his victory). By juxtaposing this same simile with the story of a man who is sure he will die, Oswald translates that self-confidence into a reckless embrace of death—the horse’s knees lift him right off the page in a kind of apotheosis.
In
addition to valorizing the deaths of lesser-known men with her repurposed
similes, Oswald often leaves out whether her subject was Greek or Trojan,
placing the stories in the order of their deaths and providing minimal background.
The rearrangement of similes, combined with the even-handed, indistinguishable
treatment of Greeks and Trojans alike sets Memorial firmly in the
pastoral tradition. Theocritus, one of the earliest pastoral poets, treated
names with a certain fluidity that made tying
them to coherent characters a difficult task. A shepherd-poet who appears in
one poem may reappear later with no recognizable traits. The world of the narrative frame lacks saturation, casting its brilliance on the shepheds’ songs. In Memorial, Oswald dispenses with the dramatically uttered frame-world
entirely in order to keep the lyric water rushing onward uninterrupted. Rather
than ascribing her similes to a single, fictional speaker, Oswald relies on the frequent use of apostrophe to signal to the reader that these biographies are meant to be spoken,placing each name carefully in our mouths. The lack of
frame narrative also has a democratizing effect. The similes, and the deaths
they represent, are strung together paratactically, eliminating the narrative
need for an explanation, a so-what, that would subordinate their deaths to some
hierarchical, justifying cause.
The biographies also participate in the pastoral tradition by providing unexpected vistas of the modern world. From Virgil onward, “the pastoral world [could] be recognized as contemporary history in herdsman’s clothing.” [11] Oswald’s poem is deeply political in this sense, and many of her unanchored anecdotes could easily have taken place today. One moment seems to resonate with the decision to invade Iraq, with its anachronistic mention of teenagers and nod towards the unethical imbrication of decision-makers and defense contractors:
Antimachus was bribed this is well known
Antimachus was a friend of Paris
Who put the case for war
He opened a door in the earth
And a whole generation entered
Including his own young sons
PEISANDER and HIPPOLOCHUS
Two dazed teenagers trotting into battle
On their father’s expensive horses …
Antimachus assured them
He had acted in good faith
But their ghosts said nothing (33-34)
These words are a present weight, what Oswald calls a “bright unbearable reality,” that parades our own “dazed teenagers” before our eyes. Oswald counterbalances the tragedy of this story with the sing-song anaphora of the first two lines, then pushes forward with the internal rhymes of “war,” “door,” and “earth,” and ultimately culminates in the irony of a father bringing about his children’s death. With a quick shift in scale from “a whole generation” to “his own young sons,” the irony breaks into the bitterness of silence and the anticlimax of a feminine ending in the final line: “But their ghosts said nothing.”
If Antimachus is opening “a door in the earth,” Oswald is inscribing the earth with the names of “a whole generation.” Her similes seek to make presence of absence:
Like leaves who could write a history of leaves
The wind blows their ghosts to the ground
And the spring breathes new leaf into the woods
Thousands of names thousands of leaves
When you remember them remember this
Dead bodies are their lineage
Which matter no more than the leaves (70)
After pushing away the materiality of the written word, Oswald ultimately confronts the materiality of the dead: they become leaves; they matter no more than leaves; they and leaves are matter. And, of course, the leaves are at once the natural world and the pages of her book. Yet the oral tradition remains the source of both kinds of leaves: they are engendered by the breath of spring. The steady exhalation of the spondee “spring breathes” bursts forth into the faster-paced iambic of “new leaf into the woods.” Orality haunts the meter of these lines, which move from a tripping iambic to the slower finality of trisyllabic anapestic (a strategic reversal of the dactylic meter of epic) in the last line: “Which mat | ter no more| than the leaves.” Even though “Dead bodies are their lineage,” Memorial refuses to leave them as the refuse of war.
Perhaps Oswald’s insistence that her poem is oral rests on the desire to unhinge the silence of the dead, to speak them back into being. Achilles, speaking to Odysseus in the Underworld in Book XI of the Odyssey, laments choosing glory over life and correlates death with the inability to speak: “O might the lamp of life rekindled burn, / And death release me from the silent urn!” [12] In an act of refusal, Memorial seals up Achilles’ name in silence, releasing instead the men marked as collateral from their silent graves to hover ghost-like in the margins of Homer’s text. Oswald does not undo their deaths or trivialize the violence that caused them, but, by the enargeia of her words, she places them “before our eyes” and carries across some of their pain in the “bright unbearable reality” of metaphor.
Works Cited
[1] Alice Oswald, “Why I Pulled out of the TS Eliot Poetry Prize,” The Guardian, December 12, 2011, sec. Opinion, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/dec/12/ts-eliot-poetry-prize-pulled-out.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Anne Bradstreet, “The Author to Her Book,” in The Complete Works of Anne Bradstreet, ed. Joseph R. McElrath (Twayne Publishers, 1981); Emily Dickinson, “Dickinson/Higginson Correspondence: Early 1866 (Letter 316),” 1866, Dickinson Electronic Archive, http://archive.emilydickinson.org/correspondence/higginson/l316.html.
[4] Homer, The Iliad of Homer, ed. John Flaxman, trans. Alexander Pope, 2015, 5.
[5] Homer, 6–7.
[6] William Shakespeare, Barbara A Mowat, and Paul Werstine, Henry V, 2020, IV.iii.54.
[7] Alice Oswald, Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad (London: Faber and Faber, 2012), 68.
[8] Mark W. Edwards, ed., The Iliad: A Commentary. 5: Books 17 - 20 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 24, n. 29.
[9] Homer, Richmond Lattimore, and Richard P. Martin, The Iliad of Homer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 216–17.
[10] Homer, Lattimore, and Martin, 351.
[11] Roland Greene, ed., The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton University Press, 2017), 1006, http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780190681173.001.0001/acref-9780190681173.
[12] Homer, The Odyssey of Homer. Translated from the Greek by Alexander Pope, Etc (W. Suttaby, 1805), XI. 609-610.
Image Credits:
1. “Marble statue of a naked Venus crouching at her bath, 2nd century AD (Antonine period), British Museum" by Following Hadrian is licensed with CC BY-SA 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
2-3. Pages 1-2 of Alice Oswald’s Memorial.
4. Bust of Homer, Roman copy of a lost Hellenistic original of the 2nd c. BC. From Baiae, Italy, British Museum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
5. Bertram Mackennal, “Grief,” 1898, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
