http:\/\/nauplion.net\/HELMET.HTM<\/a><\/p>\nI wanted it because \u201cThe Helmet\u201d is such a beautiful spinoff from Book 6 of the Iliad<\/em>. Longley\u2019s poems inspired by Homer are fine in remarkably different ways. This one is like a sharp glass splinter. Most of the pathos and emotional complexity of the meeting between Hector and Andromache as developed in the Iliad<\/em> have been stripped out in Longley\u2019s version. Gone is Andromache\u2019s grief at the death of her father and seven brothers, all at Achilles\u2019 hands, and at her mother\u2019s death by disease. Gone is her fear that she and their child will now lose Hector too. Gone are Hector\u2019s awareness of the futility of his battle and his knowledge that Troy will die and Andromache and Astyanax be dragged off as slaves. In the Iliad<\/em>, the dramatic life of the passage is in the way one moment Andromache and Hector are facing each other in complicated despair at the future they both know is coming, and the next they\u2019re released into loving laughter by the boy\u2019s fear of Hector\u2019s helmet. His reaction is very ordinary and human \u2013 I remember how disconcerted I was when my toddler son was terrified by seeing me in a cardboard mask I\u2019d made to entertain him. Of course it\u2019s ironic that they\u2019re laughing at Astyanax\u2019s reaction to a symbol of the very fears that have been weighing on them in an adult way a moment before. That irony isn\u2019t the heart of the thing in Homer, though. The heart of it is in the beautifully natural and simple way in which Homer has captured what Proust called \u201cles intermittences du coeur\u201d \u2013 that fluctuating nature of our emotions that here gives Hector and Adromache the kind of inner life the Greek heroes can\u2019t have because they are so monolithically conceived.<\/p>\nLongley\u2019s very short poem achieves its concentrated impact by resolving the fluctuations and complexities of the situation in the Iliad<\/em> into much simpler contrasts. \u201cShiny Hector\u201d, the godlike figure of myth, is contrasted with the vulnerable child. He\u2019s also contrasted with himself, as it were, in another aspect or relation \u2013 with himself as \u201chis father\u201d and \u201chis daddy\u201d. The main thrust of the poem is to suggest the monstrosity of war by omitting everything that in Homer makes Hector\u2019s fighting inevitable and by showing us the mask of war through a baby\u2019s eyes, and then to suggest the dreadful perversity of Hector\u2019s wish for his son. It\u2019s brilliantly done by the sharpness with which the opposing states of being are evoked: the shiny, flashing, metallic and horsehair world of the warrior and the violent emotions it causes, described in a subtly heightened and formalized register, all set against the warm world of the family, the soft, comforting breasts, the intimate nexus of wean, daddy and mammy, and the simple almost childish phrasing of lines 5 and 6.<\/p>\nGeneral points about war and tribalism are obviously being suggested; there\u2019s an\u00a0overlap with Chinua Achebe\u2019s poem \u201cVultures\u201d which I used to teach for GCSE, though in Longley\u2019s poem the suggestions are made in a defter, subtler and vastly more concise way. But of course there is a very specific reference too. The use of Ulster Scots words \u2013 \u201cwean\u201d, \u201cmammy\u201d, \u201cbabbie\u201d \u2013 and the use of \u201cterrorized\u201d\u00a0 instead of \u201cterrified\u201d make it clearly a poem to be read in the context of the Northern Irish troubles (except for the sake of this effect, \u201cterrorized\u201d would be a clumsy choice of word because it implies an intention<\/em> to terrify on Hector\u2019s part). So Longley uses the Homeric source selectively, to make his own point with fierce intensity. The point is one I\u2019d find it hard to imagine anyone resisting, and it\u2019s made memorably and extremely well. At the same time, this kind of focused making of a point is something very different to the openness of suggestion and amplitude of understanding that we find in Homer<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Looking for a link to Longley\u2019s \u201cThe Helmet\u201d I found this site with a wonderful little anthology of contemporary poems and passages inspired by Homer: http:\/\/nauplion.net\/homer.html This seems to be a subsection of a larger site with links to all the poems in an anthology I hadn\u2019t come across – Nina Kossman\u2019s Gods and Mortals: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91,63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-homer","category-michael-longley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=378"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1412,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378\/revisions\/1412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}