Medon the donkey

Cover of How to Read a Poem

Oswald skips several Trojan deaths here, and then attaches the simile of the island town on fire from invaders, lighting beacon fires asking for help, which Homer uses of the light from Achilles' head when he terrifies the Trojans by his scream alone, to the deaths of Stichius and Arkesilaus; but instead of the light (of the beacon fires) being like the light from Achilles' head, it is the smoke from the fires Oswald uses as a comparison, that vanishes from the earth like Stichius and Arkesilaus.

Then Aeneas kills off Medon and Iasus, with a line of description for each of them; Oswald concentrates on Medon, bastard son of Oileus, who killed his stepmother's kinsman, fled to Phylace, and wound up (after Philoctetes was abandoned) leading the Phthians at Troy.  Oswald adds that he then went on to Troy, and died in the 9th year.  To him she attaches the simile Homer uses of Ajax attacked by a flock of Trojans, who can't be moved by them any more than a sluggish donkey who's gotten into a cornfield and just keeps eating until he's had his fill and decides to move on, utterly unresponsive to the blows of the boys trying to drive him out with clubs.   Only she attaches this to Medon. How? Medon stubbornly killed a man, fled, fled on to Troy, kept fighting until he'd decided in his own sweet time that he was ready to die?

The translation, as always, is wonderful.  Oswald amplifies the mention of his father's wife (μητρυιῆς Ἐριώπιδος) to "grew up under the smile of a slim respectable stepmother", for example.  And the description of the donkey, who "thinking good I will wade and eat sideways/ ... does just that eats and eats sunk in a pond of corn".

I've begun reading Terry Eagleton "How to Read a Poem", since it's not something I've been trained in really (nor indeed something my teachers were trained in I think).  Eagleton identifies this problem in his students, that modern work tends to be content analysis which is largely oblivious to whether the "content" comes encased in a novel, a poem, or a real-life happening.  He says (instead of dealing with the 'literariness' of the work),

"... they treat the poem as though its author chose for some eccentric reason to write out his or her views on warfare or sexuality in lines which do not reach to the end of the page.  Maybe the computer got stuck." 

                                    (Terry Eagleton, How to Read a Poem; Blackwell, Oxford 2007: 3.) 

That, embarrassingly, would be me; but Memorial makes me want to really up my game, and be able to say precisely what's so cool about it, which isn't just content, or even just its relationship to Homer.

Related articles

• Terry Eagleton on close analysis of language | The Oxonian Review

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