Michael Longley: Anticleia

Length / Form 18 lines, ending with rhymed couplet (‘sky’/’die’). Shows Longley’s development of the longer line at this stage of his career. The form of the poem is one, long, conditional sentence that is also a question.

Allusion to Classical figure Anticleia, mother of Odysseus (named only in the title).

Allusion to Classical place Hades and the descent to Hades from the rock where the three tributaries of the Styx meet.

Relationship to Classical text Draws on Descent to the Underworld (katabasis) episode in Homer, Odyssey X. (closely follows X. 508–530); Od. X1 (84–89 and 150–224). Close inclusion of rendering in English of Od.X1 lines 205–8. Version - starts with speech (spoken by Circe in Odyssey), moves on to questions about life after death based on Odysseus' encounter with his mother in Underworld.

Classical/post-Classical intertexts This katabasis is 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 ‘Tree-House’, ‘Laertes’, ‘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’.  In the anagnorisis poem sequence Longley draws on mythic structures and epic forms and images to rework biographical material. More distant comparisons include Derek Mahon’s rewriting in ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’ (1975) of aspects of Seferis’ rewriting of aspects of the descent to the Underworld in Homer and Derek Walcott’s use of the katabasis in Omeros Book 3 (1990) to explore the non-recognition by his father of Achille, who in a dream returns to the  African village of his ancestors. In Gorse Fires, Longley’s non-classical poem ‘The Balloon’ represents a healing contrast to the anguish of ‘Anticleia’ (which it immediately follows), with the lines ‘You are a child in the dream and not my mother’.

Comment The Gorse Fires collection is dedicated to the memory of Longley’s parents. The dedicatory lines explore the connection between the physical aspects of nature and the imagination. Longley employs the image of a bird leaving tracks on the snow covering their graves to evoke a continuing physical relationship in the coffin ‘where I imagine her ashes settling on his collarbone’. In ‘Anticleia’ the sharp sword in odyssey X1.48 becomes a bayonet. The references to what Odysseus will tell his wife are omitted and Anticleia’s words (directly spoken in Homer, Od. X1, 210 – 214 and 219 - 222) are turned into reported speech, increasing the shaping authority of the modern narrator/poet.
See 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. 105.