Michael Longley: Eurycleia

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 ‘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’. 

Comment 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. 100.