SIMILE THE GRASS IS SINGING SERIES
The final section consists of a series of eleven similes, with the last one repeated twice (70–81). All the names in section 2 align with the ones listed in section 1. The second section (9–69) begins with the biography of the first man to die at Troy, Protesilaos (also listed first in the first section), followed by a simile repeated twice, establishing a pattern that continues throughout this part of the poem, with some variations and occasional interruptions by shorter lists of names. With the exception of the horse Pedasus, all the names belong to Greeks and Trojans who die in Homer’s Iliad, and they are listed in chronological order of their deaths (and using inconsistent spelling). The first consists of a list of 214 names printed one name per line in upper case letters (1–8). 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. 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. 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. 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 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. In this article, I focus on the ways in which Alice Oswald presents lament in her 2012 Memorial: A Version of Homer's Iliad.
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