Michael Longley: Tree-house

Allusion to Classical figure Odyssey

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: 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.