Michael Longley: Old Soldiers

Length / Form 2 x 4-line stanzas

Allusion to Classical figure Socrates, Idomeneus, Priam

Comment This is a poem of that links the poet’s father and himself through elderly figures in antiquity; Socrates, Idomeneus and Priam. The first stanza refers to old soldiers holding their ground – Socrates at Delion and Idomeneus, king of Crete, in the battles outside Troy where he had sailed to support Menelaus because he himself had been a suitor of Helen. In the Iliad his epithet was ‘spear-famed’ and in Book 13 Homer likens the aged but strong warrior to a ‘great mountain boar’. The concluding four lines of Longley’s poem move from endurance by the elderly to fear. Priam dreads the time at which his corpse will be mauled by dogs and the fear of death is linked with Longley’s father through the love of dogs that he shares with Priam.

Note First printed Times Literary Supplement, 1 January, 2005.