Michael Longley: The Butchers

Allusion to Classical figure Odyssey

Relationship to Classical text ironic perspective

Classical/post-Classical intertexts One of several poems in Longley’s Gorse Fires that uses episodes from the Odyssey to address ideas of ‘home’ and relationships. The others are ‘Laertes’, ‘Anticleia’, ‘Eurycleia’, ‘Argos’, all of which play on Homeric recognition scenes, in contrast to the violence enacted in the house which is treated in ‘The Butchers’.

Comment  See:

E. Hall The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer's Odyssey, London: I.B.Tauris, 2008, p.183.

L. P. Hardwick, Greece and Rome New Surveys in the Classics, no. 33, Reception Studies; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 90-9;  tr. into Modern Greek 2013 by Dr Ioanna Karamanou and published by Papazisi.

S. Broom, ‘Learning about Dying: Mutability and the Classics in the Poetry of Michael Longley’ New Hibernia Review Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2002, pp. 94-112 esp. p. 107.

 P. McDonald, ‘An Interview with Michael Longley’ Thumbscrew 12 (1988-9) www.poetrymagazines.org.uk:  ‘Moments in the Odyssey chimed with emotions that I would have found almost impossible to deal with otherwise: heartbreak, paranoia, bitterness, hatred, fear. Homer gave me a new emotional and psychological vocabulary. The last poem in Gorse Fires, 'The Butchers', was a cleansing, a catharsis. I was purging feelings of distaste - distaste for Northern Ireland and its filthy sectarianism, for the professional career I'd pursued for twenty years, for Public Life and its toxins.’ (Michael Longley)