‘A word from another world’: mourning and similes in Homeric epic and Alice Oswald’s Memorial

Abstract

This article focuses on Alice Oswald's 2012 Memorial: A Version of Homer's Iliad and its connections with ancient epic and lament. Oswald's poem is inspired by the Iliad, but omits the plot and most of the main events to focus on minor characters' encounters with death and the grief they leave behind. Memorial thus strongly rejects the possibility of heroism on the battlefield, and foregrounds mourning. Oswald's narrator interacts with both the characters of the poem and the audience, reactivating an ancient tradition for a modern audience, turning readers (and listeners) into mourners, and connecting the dead from the past and the audience in the present. In this article, I focus on the ways in which Alice Oswald presents lament in her 2012 Memorial: A Version of Homer's Iliad. The poem is directly inspired by Homeric epic, but by foregrounding the theme of mourning, Memorial invites us to revisit the ancient poem's relationship with lament. Oswald rejects the Iliad's focus on Achilles, who appears in Memorial only fleetingly as a secondary character, and instead turns to remembering the deaths of all the warriors who die in battle in the poem, giving each of them equal attention. The theme of lament is thus a central point of contact between the Iliad and Oswald's Memorial, and when it comes to mourning, both poems accomplish the same thing by eliciting mourning for the heroes of the past in the present of their audience. Yet the two poems differ in how they connect past and present, and the ways in which the narrator interacts with the characters and audience. After a brief introduction of Memorial, I examine the theme of lament in the Iliad and in Oswald's poem, focusing on the connection between narrator and audience, and more particularly on the ways in which Memorial's narrator addresses readers (and listeners) as if they were mourners at a funeral service. Retelling the Iliad Memorial is divided into three sections. The first consists of a list of 214 names printed one name per line in upper case letters (1-8). With the exception of the horse