UNDERSTANDING "THE WOIl..U)"
137
of the work that Helen has already described rather eloquently.
"Pictures."
An open book. A brown moth
fl
utters and swoops
Above the dust-cloud where a chariot hurtles.
Touched, the moth falls as its golden powder settles
Over the ranks of conquering Greek troops.
The chariot rolls over, and Hector's head
Bumps on the cobbles, dragged behind his horses.
The moth, pinned among th e turning pages,
Flutters on the hero 's body, then is dead.
Meanwhile, clouds darken; thunder booms alarm;
Ships dash fi'om the jagged cliffs
to
safer harbor;
Nearby , his oxen grunting at their steady labor,
A naked plowman works a hillside farm .
Bob's account of this poem as ending with a kind of a glance at the econOrrllC
reality behind "The World" seems to me quite appropriate. That reality could
be said to resolve the conflict or dance in the poem, the perspective between
the epic world of the
iliad,
and perhaps of the war outside. "Ships dash from
the jagged cliffs to safer harbor" could be the
Iliad,
or it could be Europe and
the little world of the moth dying. What could be more microcosmic?
In
the
little world of my copy of the
Iliad,
in the tiny scale of my imagination, the
brutality of Achilles and Achilles' defiance of ri tual and decorum and decen–
cy as he mutilates and desecrates the body of his enemy is contained inside
the decorum of my picture-book, and perhaps in the peace of my study, or
perhaps within the eloquence of the essay I write about the
Iliad.
Ultimately
the atnlOsphere of the study is perhaps acceded to in the
Iliad
when Achilles
accedes to ceremony. That is an innocent, perhaps naive encounter, the little
world of the moth dying on the page where the hero is, but it recalls both
works of art and the larger brutali ties that Homer depicts in the
Iliad.
Now another poem, "The Bird Kingdom." Sometimes when you're
flailing about in translation , you think there 's an ingredient from an aes–
thetic bottle you could just pour out of, and the bottle that, perhaps
mistakenly, came to mind was labeled "Roethke"-"Maybe we should
just pour some Roethke over this one." "The Bird Kingdom." [Reads
poem.]
It
seems to me if you think of "The World" as having a kind of
course, a graph, the relationshi p of the microcosm and macrocosm may
be equal to that of the relationshi p between the bird world and the
