"And then it's gone…"

          When first reading Alice Oswald’s Memorial, I was rather displeased at her assertion that she had captured the atmosphere of the Iliad. After all, I felt that within his poem she had left out the all too important narrative of Achilles’ struggle to come to terms with his mortality, and the rage that evolves from this. However, I think my jump to discredit Oswald’s attempt to capture the atmosphere was too hasty. For although she may not have captured every atmosphere presented in the Iliad, as these can be subjective, she does not exclude Achilles’ struggle with mortality. Instead, she had hidden it, has delicately intertwined this struggle in the last string on similes in her poem.

            Oswald ends Memorial with a series of similes, one after the other, each taking a page to itself yet not filling it. The similes are comparisons to leaves on trees (70), chaff flying at threshing time (71), thousands of water birds (72), wandering tribes of flies (73), crickets (74), strobe lit wasps (75), tribes of summer bees (76), locusts (77), restless wolves (78), and water hitting a rocky dam (79). All of these things are secular, all things of this earth. These similes are used to describe human nature, the temporariness of being human.

            Not only can these series of similes showcase Achilles’ human side, it can also build up suspense in the poem that is plateaued at the repetition of the final simile. There are ten similes about humanity, followed by the repetition of “Like when a god throws a star and everyone looks up to see that whip of sparks and then it’s gone”.  The ten worldly similes are followed by the repetition of a celestial simile. The spark of the star can be the immortality Achilles almost had, and as the simile suggests, he only had a glimpse and then it was gone.

            The series of similes at the end of Memorial can be read in many ways. However, if we take into account that this could be one way of depicting the idea of mortality that Achilles’ struggles with and that the Iliad addresses throughout its pages, then Oswald has not left out one crucial aspect of the epic. In fact, she made it the closing of her poem, the part that echoes in your head after you have finished reading. Oswald has illuminated the struggle with mortality in a beautiful and intricate way: through the purposeful placement of similes.

Pledge: Michaela Knipp