Following on from our piece on ‘Alternative WWI Poets for Remembrance Day‘, we’ve put together a short list of poems / collections that could be disseminated to your pupils as suggested reading. Each of the poems is classically-inspired in some way; we have included a brief synopsis of each to guide selection!
Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad, Alice Oswald
Shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize before she pulled it from competition in protest of the competition’s sponsors, Oswald’s ‘excavation of the Iliad‘ eschews the traditional narrative both of Achilles’ wrath and the wider Trojan War to focus instead on the two-hundred-or-so ‘ordinary’ ordinary soldiers who are killed in the poem.
The first few pages simply list the names of the fallen, as if carved onto a war memorial: from then on, the poet describes the death of each man directly and without euphemism. Most notable perhaps is Oswald’s choice to repeat the extended similes that describe each death; life is extinguished, then washed back for a moment, and finally released for good as we move onto the next in her roll of honour. The dichotomy between the bleakness of these deaths and the bucolic imagery that features in her similes is at once comforting and disturbing; simply put, the current Professor of Poetry at Oxford has produced something remarkable here.
War Music, Christopher Logue
Christopher Logue (1926-2011) sadly never completed his great project: an ‘account’ (in his own words) of the Iliad. Logue stoked mild controversy in that he didn’t know a single world of ancient Greek, but, relying on a crib from Donald Carne-Ross and various other translations, he began publishing his work in 1959 and was still working on the collection at the time of his death in 2011.
Logue’s is a cinematic (‘Reverse the shot. / Go close’), imagist approach to the Iliad: colloquialisms and anachronisms (witness helicopters and nuclear weapons) feature frequently, as do strikingly beautiful similes:
Picture the east Aegean sea by night,
And on a beach aslant its shimmering
Upwards of 50,000 men
Asleep like spoons beside their lethal Fleet.
Logue is unafraid to abridge, omit and alter in his treatment of Homer: if you want to read something fearless, original and (at moments) grotesque – Lycon’s head dangling by a thread of skin ‘like a melon’ – look no further than War Music.
‘Ceasefire‘, Michael Longley
A poem of only fourteen lines stands in contrast to our other suggestions; and yet these mere fourteen lines carry an inestimable weight. At first blush, Longley seems to have produced a synopsis of the famous meeting between Achilles and Priam in Book 24 of the Iliad; the only word that hints at something beyond the Trojan War is ‘uniform’, standing in the place of an expected ‘armour’ or even ‘clothes’.
One of Northern Ireland’s pre-eminent poets, Longley wrote this poem in 1994 upon hearing rumours of a possible ceasefire to ‘the Troubles’; in a startling coincidence, it was published in the Irish Times a few days before such a truce was announced. With its evocation of loss, love, (mis)understanding, compromise and forgiveness, Longley deftly bridges the temporal space between these two conflicts – one ancient, one modern – without ever losing sight of the underlying humanity:
‘I get down on my knees and do what must be done
And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.’
The Word for Sorrow, Josephine Balmer
Balmer begins her collection by outlining her task: a translation of Ovid’s oft-ignored Tristia. Working from an ancient dictionary after a power-outage, the poet discovers the faded name of a schoolboy (‘Geoffrey’) inscribed upon the fly-leaf of the book: ‘January 1st 1900’. What follows is a masterful balancing-act between Balmer’s translations of Ovid’s exilic poetry and her exploration of the schoolboy’s life – it turns out that he fought with the British Yeomanry at Gallipoli during the First World War.
Balmer uses the geographical proximity of Ovid’s exile and ‘Geoffrey’s’ posting to entwine their narratives together: we watch on as interactions between these texts, ancient and modern, begin to unearth themselves. This mixture of original and translation – along with actual diary entries and letters from soldiers who fought at Gallipoli – skilfully draws parallels between past and present, and forces the reader to consider common themes that stretch across the centuries.
In Parenthesis, David Jones
Our final suggestion is similar to War Music in its resistance to easy categorisation; In Parenthesis is one of the more unique pieces of literature that you are ever likely to encounter. For all its references and allusions to other texts, however, there are few links to either Rome or Greece: perhaps its most ‘classical’ element is the title, suggestive that the First World War was an experience that ought be bracketed off from the rest of history and humanity.
David Jones (1895-1974) was a painter and modernist poet, who served in the Royal Welch Fusiliers during the First World War. Despite the lack of allusions to the classical world, I have included it here for its relation to TS Eliot’s ‘mythical method’: the manipulation of myth to bring order and sense to the chaotic contemporary. The poem is a mixture of metres, styles and genres: formal verse and prose sit side-by-side with Cockney rhyming slang and military lingo.
The poem traces the experiences of Private John Ball as he travels from Southampton to Mametz Wood at the height of the First World War. Jones packs the pages with allusions to the Gododdin, the Mabonogion, Shakespeare, Malory and more, aligning the Battle of the Somme with the Welsh defeats at Catraeth and Camalan. W.H. Auden praised the poem as doing ‘for the British and the Germans what Homer did for the Greeks and the Trojans’; for those students wanting to look beyond the normal boundary of Greece and Rome, this would be perfect.
