Abstract for the CACW

English: intrpretation of the Shield of Achilles design described in the Iliad, by Angelo Monticelli (1778-1837) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I spent three months working on a grant proposal, but come to the conclusion that I'll be in a better position to successfully apply for a grant next year, so didn't submit it after all. So back to Oswald! 

The CACW/ CAPN conference this year is on the subject of "decisions in antiquity". Legal scholars are organizing it, and no doubt that's what they had in mind. However, that's not what I work on. I thought about submitting an abstract on Iphigenia at Aulis, which after all is all about the decision to sacrifice Iphigenia, something no one wants to do, but somehow it happens after all. However, although it's an interesting subject, I haven't been working on it, and I'm not sure I have anything to contribute on the I.A. at this point.

 So I thought, instead, about Memorial. And it immediately occurred to me that a very interesting thing about Memorial is that all of the decisions of the Iliad  have been omitted from Memorial, along with the narrative.  And that I would like to talk about.  So here is the abstract I submitted: we'll see if it flies ...

 The Decisions of Memorial 

 Alice Oswald's poem "Memorial", a re-translation of the death scenes in the Iliad, highlights the decision-making processes in the Iliad, by their absence in the modern poem.

 Decision-making processes in the Iliad are given prominence. Important decisions governing the entire narrative are made by those high in the social hierarchy – gods, kings, and aristocrats – and the process by which they arrive at decisions is shown in detail. Achilles chooses glory over a long life, and then changes his mind; Zeus chooses whose death, Achilles or Hector's, weighs more in the balance at the critical moment; the Shield of Achilles displays an alternative decision-making process for the peaceful settling of disputes.

 "Memorial", which removes the overarching narrative, the gods, and the major aristocrats, also removes all the points of decision of the Iliad, except for those small decisions individuals make which contribute to their own deaths. These omissions make each individual death seem inevitable, and the decision-making processes of the narrative illusory. For all the importance given to decision-making in the Iliad, argues "Memorial",the end was always known, and only the deaths were real.

***
I am not sure that the observation that when you skip the story, you also miss out on all the decision-making, which is (after all) part of the story, is a deep insight into the nature of narrative.  But it will be fun to think about.

Related articles

• Alice Oswald wins Warwick prize

What the I Ching told me about research

Oracle shell with inscriptions This is a replica of an oracle turtle shell with ancient Chinese oracle scripts inscribed on it. Since this is a replica, the color may not be truthful to the real specimen. This photo was taken in July 2004 from an exhibit at Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, California. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In 1989, 5 years before I finished my PhD, I asked the I Ching how I should find a thesis topic.   The answer was so extraordinarily apropos that I saved it.  I did not, however, follow it, which is why it took me five years to finish, instead of 18-24 months.

I found the response again just now, while tidying up my files and preparing to get back to work after the teaching term.  It's still good advice.  Perhaps a quarter of a century on I will have the sense to follow it.

Question:  How should I go about finding a topic for my thesis? 

Response:    Modesty

It is the way of the world to fill the empty cup.  Modesty is often rewarded in human affairs, just as valleys are filled by the erosion of great mountains.  Regardless of your position, Laurel, modesty is a very positive attribute.  If you are in a high position but are nonetheless modest, people will be drawn to you and the causes you espouse.  If your position is lowly, modesty will endear you to those of higher status.  Accordingly, true modesty is a virtue to which all should aspire. 

The most successful people are those who know how to bring each situation into balance by reducing that which is too great, and adding to that which is too little.  Such a person craves not power, but stable relations among men.  Modesty is the virtue which allows you to perceive the balancing force in each situation; humble people are not prey to the many illusions which grow out of self-aggrandizement.  If modesty is not natural to your disposition, Laurel, make a conscious effort to develop a strain of self-effacing humor.  Either that, or go into politics. 

There's an element of transformation in this situation. 

Even modesty, the most benevolent virtue, can be carried too far, Laurel.  People in humble positions can easily use false modesty as an excuse for weakness or vacillation.   True modesty does not imply humble goals, or a slack attitude regarding performance standards.  Taking pride in your work, Laurel, is very different from the pride born of self-importance.  

I'm back at work on Alice Oswald, and plan to post regular updates on weekdays.  Today I've spent shuffling files around on my computer, which (on the one hand) had to be done, but (on the other) I strongly suspect to be primarily a subtle and fiendish form of procrastination, like housecleaning - one can feel virtuous about it but it is, nevertheless, really beside the point.

Related articles

• Leonard Cohen Uses I-Ching

Epeigeus the exile

English: Jules Bastien-Lepage, Achilles and Priam (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I'm trying to follow Oswald's sequence here.  

In Homer, Hector kills Epeigeus as he's about to strip the corpse of Sarpedon, and crushes his skull with a big rock and he falls dead on the corpse.  He was a prince in Budeion, until he "stripped the corpse" of a cousin, and was sent off as a suppliant to Peleus, and then to Troy, and then died as he stripped the corpse of Sarpedon,or tried to, on the battlefield.  So his life story, in Homer, begins and ends with two corpse-strippings; one successful, one attempted.

Oswald charts this as changes - Epeigeus went from well-regarded prince to runaway, beggar, soldier, and corpse.  And then she uses the astonishing simile used of Priam when he kisses Achilles' bloody hands, and everyone was as astonished to see him, 

"as when strong folly (ἄτη) takes a man, who in his fatherland

having killed someone leaves to the country of others

into (the house) of a rich man, and wonder holds those looking at him,

so Achilles was astonished seeing Priam, like a god".  

But Oswald says "like anger that ... can change any man into a murderer" - but what's like anger? As far as I can tell, here, it's the rock; anger changes a man into something entirely different, a beggar seeking shelter, a different person, the way the rock turned Epeigeus into something different, a shade, a corpse, someone he wouldn't recognize himself as.  

But what does it bring to Oswald's poem that this is the simile used of Priam when he comes to Achilles as a suppliant? Because Epeigeus actually IS a murderous suppliant, where Priam is not; Achilles is the one who has killed, and Priam is the suppliant to him; the blood is printed on Achilles' hands. Anger changed Epeigeus into a killer and ultimately a corpse; it turned Priam into a suppliant and ultimately into a corpse; I'm still not getting this.  

Related articles

• The Next-to-Last Scene of the Iliad

Pedasus

I may have already used this cartoon (from toothpastefordinner.com.).  It is the most perfect image of my creative process I've ever seen.  Apparently everyone else on the web feels the same way, which is reassuring.

I'm back in the classroom.  Predictably, this causes me to have all kinds of ideas about work all the time, but now I have no time to write them down.  However, I'm giving a paper on Alice Oswald in 3 weeks, which is serving to focus my attention marvellously.

I have 18 death scenes and about the same number of similes to get through before I've finished the Homeric footnotes.  Arguably I would be better off skipping finishing that until later and just get on with writing the paper on the part I've already done.  But I'd like to feel as if I've got a firm handle on something, and how long can it take me to - yes, I know, months - however, I don't have months. So I've got to the yellow zone in the bar graph, where I still think it's possible to do all the things, if I just do them really fast.

Am also reading a book on "Stylish Academic Writing", by Helen Sword.   It is unpleasant to suspect that the result of my work will be articles that I wouldn't want to read myself. I would like to write what I would enjoy reading if I happened on it.  Helen Sword's book gives me a modest sort of hope that this is actually attainable.  So thank you, HW.

So: Pedasus.  Oswald tells the story of his death pretty much from the horse's-eye point of view; first he was fed by one group, that had stone mangers; then by another group, that had bags of grain; then he died.  The entire battle scene and the other two horses are missing.  I think they are recuperated (according to Helen Sword I should not be using that word here in this sense, because nobody will understand it and I'm just trying to impress people by talking fancy) by the simile, however.   Oswald uses the "fig juice curdling milk" simile here.  Homer uses it at the end of book 5, where Apollo uses φάρμακα to heal Ares' wound, as fast as fig juice curdles milk.  Oswald uses it to refer to the speed of Pedasus' death; his blood, I suppose, coagulating in death, he turning from animate to a solid lump, at the same speed.  But the interesting thing is (of course) that Ares is immortal, as Homer points out; and Pedasus' two companion horses are also immortal.  If the spear had got one of them, they could have been healed, as fast as Ares.  Bad luck, Pedasus.

Related articles

• Dahlia Ravikovitch and Alice Oswald
• On Deadlines
• SHORT CUTS : books to read for people with unruly stacks in unlikely places
• Epic Literature in Modern Drama

Patroclus' aristeia, not

Ulysses (with a pilos) and Greek warriors around the body of Patroclus. Detail of a silver oinochoe dedicated ,by Q. Domitius Tutus, made in Italy, first half of the 1st century AD. From the Berthouville treasure. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Homer now gives us 200 lines of Greeks slaughtering Trojans.  First every Greek leader kills his own Trojan, a kind of bring-your-own-(dead)-Trojan buffet; then Patroclus starts slaughtering them wholesale.  We get descriptions of how each one died as long as they're being killed by different Greek chieftains, but when Patroclus steps in we just get a list of names of the Trojans he slaughters.  Oswald gives us nothing but a list of 21 names; we aren't told who killed each one and she doesn't differentiate between the ones killed by other Greeks and the list of those killed by Patroclus.  The list ends with the name of Sarpedon's charioteer, Thrasymelos, which in Homer is preceded by the lengthy discussion between Zeus and Hera about the coming death of Zeus' son Sarpedon, which Zeus would like to avoid (and which is important because he is Zeus' son).

The importance of the slaughter in Homer is that the tide of battle has now turned back, and the Greeks are winning again; and that Patroclus may be primarily important as Achilles' close friend and companion, but he is a formidable warrior in his own right.  Since he's going to die soon he needs to be given weight and importance of his own, and this aggregation of deaths gives him that.  Even the Trojans killed by the other Greeks redound to Patroclus' credit because they occur after his arming scene and because his appearance has heartened the Greeks to go back on the attack.  Oswald elides the foreshadowing of the death of Sarpedon, which gives weight to all the deaths, and to the death of Thrasymelos, because here as elsewhere she lets individual deaths stand on their own.

After this list Oswald gives us this simile:

Like hawk wings cut through a sheet of starlings
Like wing-scissors open and close
Through a billow of jackdaws

This comes from a simile that actually shows up fairly close to this scene in Homer.  After Patroclus kills Sarpedon, a Trojan kills a Greek (whom we've never heard of before) over his body, and Patroclus, enraged at his sudden new BFF's death, returns to the Sarpedon's corpse:

"And he went straight through the fore-fighters like a hawk
swiftly, who terrifies the jackdaws and starlings;
so you, horse-driving Patroklos, drove off the Lykians and Trojans,
and your heart was angered for your companion."

I initially thought that Oswald was using the simile exactly the same way, and even about the same person (Patroclus), but actually not quite.  In Homer, the hawk is the subject.  In Oswald, the hawk doesn't appear; only the hawk wings, the hawk's effect, like scissors, cutting through a sheet of starlings, a billow of jackdaws.  Homer's hawk is Patroclus; Oswald's hawk is death, impersonal; the starlings and jackdaws are the living beings here.

three balls in the air

Jacques-Louis David - Homer Reciting his Verses to the Greeks - WGA06120 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

First, Myth on the Map.  Spent an hour today in conversation trying to disentangle when we should, and when we shouldn't, indicate group membership in the xml coding.  I don't think like a computer programmer at all and this made my head hurt.

Second, sacrificial virgins.  Agreed that we would go over our notes and meet on Tuesday and decide if we actually want to write this paper, since we both have things we are supposed to be doing and will get more credit for doing. But this would be fun. But.

Third, Oswald p. 56, on the deaths of 2 Greeks and 2 Trojans, in a list  (though she doesn't identify them by group affiliation, which was particularly striking to me as I'd just spent the morning thinking about groups in Homer; in Homer, the group is the whole point; in Oswald, each individual death is the whole point).  She then has a simile which she's pulled from Iliad 12, the battle at the walls where the Trojans and Greeks are flinging boulders at each other:

"As the flakes that fall thick upon a winter's day, when Zeus is minded to snow and to display these his arrows to humankind - he lulls the wind to rest, and snows hour after hour till he has buried the tops of the high mountains, the headlands that jut into the sea, the grassy plains, and the tilled fields of men; the snow lies deep upon the forelands, and havens of the gray sea, but the waves as they come rolling in stay it that it can come no further, though all else is wrapped as with a mantle so heavy are the heavens with snow - even thus thickly did the stones fall on one side and on the other, some thrown at the Trojans, and some by the Trojans at the Achaeans; and the whole wall was in an uproar." 

(Perseus website translation).

Oswald's translation is much prettier, and repurposes, this time from active to passive.  In Homer, the stones thrown by the Greeks and Trojans at each other fall as thickly as snow in a blizzard.  In Oswald, after another list of bodies, it's the deaths; the bodies falling so thickly and fast that they obscure the landscape, the trees, the fields, the harbours and beaches, and are obliterated in the sea.

And it has indeed occurred to me that I would make much faster progress on any one project if I had only one project.

Related articles

• Scholia to Iliad 14.506 in Two Manuscripts in Venice (Venetus A and Marciana 458)
• 2012.07.18
• 1) The illiad
• The rise of a Homeric world
• Week One of the CHS summer seminar 2012
• An eyeful of Playhouse's 'An Iliad'

Home Again

English: Aerial view of the village of Passchendaele (north is to the right of the photo) before and after the Third Battle of Ypres, 1917. Français : Vue aerienne du village de Passendale, avant et après la troisième bataille d'Ypres, en 1917. Le nord est à droite sur les photos. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A CWGC cemetery from the First World War: Tyne Cot in the Ypres Salient (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

THE THIRD BATTLE OF YPRES The Battle of Pilckem Ridge : A British 18 pounder field gun battery taking up new positions close to a communication trench near Boesinghe, 31 July 1917. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Map of the Third Battle of Ypres (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

After a month away, I'm back in Victoria and have finally unpacked and got back to my desk.  Today, Kaletor, Lykophron and Kleitos have all been killed, "it goes on and on" as Oswald remarks, partly because the list of dead soldiers in the Iliad is so bloody long, but partly because those are a sequence of vengeance-deaths.  Ajax kills Kaletor; Hector, enraged at the death of his cousin (N.B. we've never been told that Hector had a cousin called Kaletor until this instant), tries to kill Ajax, misses, and nails Lykophron; Ajax, enraged that his good friend of the family Lykophron who lived with Ajax' family because he'd killed someone back home and whom Ajax honoured like his own father (and we've never been told any of that before either), calls up Teucer to avenge the death.  Teucer sends out a hail of arrows but misses Hector and gets Kleitos, who is just riding up into the thick of the battle to help Hector out.  "It goes on and on".

Oswald skips all the made-up-this-instant retconning Homer inserts to give these deaths some emotional resonance.  First Kaletor, then Lykophron, then Kleitos.  They don't, in Oswald, need some made-up reason for someone important (Ajax, Teucer, Hector) to care about them for their deaths to matter.  Their deaths already matter.

While we were in Belgium went to Ypres and Passchendaele, and the German and Tyne Cot World War 1 cemeteries.  I stood at Ypres, where young men had died by the thousands, mired to the waist in a bog of mud, and blood, and corpses, and ordinance, and mustard gas, and poison, and rain; and knew that I was certainly standing over bodies, or parts of bodies, of soldiers whose corpses had never been found. I thought about the Iliad, where at least the dead, or most of the dead, had names.

Related articles

• Play review: 'Iliad' a mesmerizing lament

Myth on the Map

English: Map of Homeric Greece with English labels Česky: Mapa homérského Řecka s anglickými popisky (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Organizational day for the website project, "Myth on the Map".  I have enough money to get a functioning website up with 2 works mapped, Apollodorus and the Catalog of Ships. Question: should I then map the rest of the Iliad, or map a test book of Pausanias?  If so, which book?  Not sure yet.  Would link to the project but it doesn't appear to be working yet. The plan is, at any rate, to finish Apollodorus and the Catalog by the end of the summer, and have a map which, when one searches for stuff, finds it and displays it.

Tweaked the outline for the "sacrificial virgins" conference paper, and resolved another Oswald simile: a list of five (dead) Greeks, followed by the simile of the eagle attacking the geese by the river.  In Homer, it's about Hector, who's the eagle.  In Oswald, the geese are named but the eagle is not; the attacker is impersonal; the war.

THE WAR! RAHR! (Source)

(Okay, so I am foolishly reminded of Loki, leaping from the upper level upon Thor. "There is only - THE WAR! RAHR!" The only truly awful line in the Avengers...)

Related articles

• 2012.06.05

  ---

• 2012.06.08

  ---

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

  ---

a death scene today: Ilioneus

Ilioneus Statue (1850s copy after ancient greec original) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For a look at her translation practice here's Oswald 52-53, on the death of Ilioneus:

Ilioneus an only child ran out of luck

He always wore that well-off look

His parents had a sheep farm

They didn't think he would die

But a spear stuck through his eye

He sat down backwards

Trying to snatch back the light

With stretched out hands

I've bolded the parts that appear in the Greek.  Here's the Greek, with a literal translation - the bolded parts, in Greek, are translated by Oswald:

ὃ δ’ οὔτασεν Ἰλιονῆα

υἱὸν Φόρβαντος πολυμήλου, τόν ῥα μάλιστα

Ἑρμείας Τρώων ἐφίλει καὶ κτῆσιν ὄπασσε·

τῷ δ’ ἄρ’ ὑπὸ μήτηρ μοῦνον τέκεν Ἰλιονῆα.

τὸν τόθ’ ὑπ’ ὀφρύος οὖτα κατ’ ὀφθαλμοῖο θέμεθλα,

ἐκ δ’ ὦσε γλήνην· δόρυ δ’ ὀφθαλμοῖο διὰ πρὸ

καὶ διὰ ἰνίου ἦλθεν, ὃ δ’ ἕζετο χεῖρε πετάσσας

ἄμφω· 

"And he (Peneleos, a Greek) wounded Ilioneus, the son of Phorbas of the plentiful flocks, whom especially among the Trojans Hermes loved and granted possessions; to him his mother bore the single (child) Ilioneus.  Him then he wounded under the eyebrow down through the base of the eye, and drove out his eyeball; and the spear went first through the eye and through the nape of the neck, and he sat down, stretching out both his hands."

Cool things: 

1. switching object to subject (Ilioneus is the object of the Greek, in the accusative until the last phrase, but is the subject in Oswald). 
2. switching personal to impersonal: in the Iliad the important thing is who killed him (Peneleos); in Oswald that's elided, and the spear killed him by itself.  A move Oswald frequently makes, because "who killed him" is not important to Memorial as it is to the Iliad.
3. "μοῦνον" = "an only child".
4. "μάλιστα Ἑρμείας Τρώων ἐφίλει καὶ κτῆσιν ὄπασσε" (Hermes loved him and gave him stuff, the most of all the Trojans) = "he always wore that well-off look", but also.
5. "ran out of luck" - also a reference to Hermes, because a ἑρμαῖον is a "lucky find", a "thing sent by Hermes".  So Hermes loved his father, but eventually, he, or his father, ran out of Hermes.
6. ὃ δ’ ἕζετο χεῖρε πετάσσας ἄμφω gets amplified with "trying to snatch back the light", which then leads to the simile, which actually is fascinating, but this is enough for today.

Related articles

• iPad App for Greek Literature

  ---

Promachus dies

Similes (Photo credit: teotwawki)

This was pretty straightforward.  I hunted around for stuff on Homeric similes; turns out others have noticed the similes in Homer.  Quite a few.  Wilamowitz among them.  Fortunately I'm not writing about the similes in Homer, hah, because if I were I'd be reading for 3 years before I could write a word.  I read Taplin's review of Moulton's book on similes (Homeric Similes, 1977, certainly much has been written since, but it was the first thing that came to hand). (See, for a very cursory list, my rapidly growing "Secondary Literature" page.  This is not, I need hardly say, a list of works I have already read.  It is aspirational.)

Moulton assumes that when he sees subtlety in Homer it's because it's there, not because it accidentally accreted into the poem.  I'm inclined to agree but again I am not writing about that, I am so very grateful to say; I am writing about Oswald, and I can certainly argue that subtlety in Memorial is "part of the poem and not there by coincidence" (Taplin, 184).  I have to admit though that Memorial's reading of the Iliad highlights a great deal of subtlety in the original text; I suspect that's by design too.

Related articles

• The Figurative Language of Simile and Metaphor: Which is Which?

  ---

Archelochus and the changing will of Zeus

English: Picture 47 of the Ambrosian Iliad, Achilles sacrificing to Zeus. Français : Image 47 de lIliade ambrosienne, Achille dédiant un sacrifice à Zeus. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In Homer, the gods decide to kill Archelochus, so a spear flung at someone else hits him.  In Memorial, the spear decides of its own free will to miss the other guy and hit Archelochus.

But then Oswald continues (p. 52),

Like the changing mind
That moves a cloud off a mountain
And makes rocks and cliffs appear
Pushing the landscape's sharp edges up
Through more and more air

This simile comes from Bk 16, where Patroclus has just suited up in Achilles' armour and is leading the Greeks to fight back the Trojans, who have just set fire to Protesilaus' ship.  The Greeks take heart and beat back the Trojans and put out the flames, the way (says the Iliad) Zeus lightning-gatherer moves a cloud etc etc., but (says the Iliad) not forever; this gives them a breather, but the war doesn't stop.  ("Changing mind" I take as a translation of στεροπηγερέτα Ζεύς, since nothing changes more quickly than lightning.) 

So in the Iliad, Greeks pushing back the Trojans and putting out the flames = Zeus (temporarily) moving a cloud off a mountain. In Oswald, a spear decides to kill one man rather than another, the way a "changing mind" moves a cloud off a mountain and reveals the (sharp, clear) landscape.  Oswald highlights the changeability of the spear and of the mind; one man could have been killed just as easily as another.  And where the Iliad's simile focuses on those who are benefitting by the divine choice (of the moment) - the Greeks are forcing the Trojans back and putting out the flames - Oswald's simile, as always, focusses on the one that did not benefit; Archelochus, who died because of the will of the gods, rather than Poulydamas who lived.

A further point of context: Zeus' favour is not going to rest with Patroclos forever, either; this simile, in the Iliad, also foreshadows his eventual death.  Its use here in Oswald grants the all but unknown Trojan Archelochus' death the importance of Patroclus's eventual death. Finally: I have yet to find anywhere in Oswald that the gods get a mention. But should re-check that.

I need to start collecting these points, and decide what matters most, and what article to write.  I'd like to just write an article on the similes, and how they work in Oswald.  I would need to talk about how they work in Homer, for comparison.

Euchenor goes to heaven

English: Arabian mare standing in a show halter pose (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Was prepared to find nothing much interesting happening here, but Oswald has cleverly turned another simile on its ear.  The simile about the well-fed, pampered aristocrat of horses, happily breaking its halter and running off to the river and where the mares are, is applied by Homer to Paris when he runs off home to visit Helen in the middle of a battle in Book 6 (granted, with Aphrodite's help); Paris is exactly that pampered, over-nourished, over-sexed, gleaming, self-centred figure, beautiful but wholly dedicated to his own pleasure, and inclined to break his halter and run away from his duty when he sees a mare.  

But here the simile is turned round and it is used of Euchenor, whom Paris has just killed. (So once again, subject to object, or object to subject; Euchenor, the object of the arrow, becomes the subject of the simile, whose former subject was the man who killed him).  Euchenor was happy to die because his father the seer told him it was die gloriously and quickly at Troy or miserably of illness at home.  So he knew this was going to happen.  And the simile is of a horse breaking free of its halter - its duty, its life - and going running on, a young happy horse, forever, in Paradise. 

Related articles

• Brain sees metaphor and simile differently

  ---

• Turn out to pasture

  ---