The Shatter Song of an Achilles (super rough draft)

This is the good shit

the way the meter is set up i almost hear two separate people speaking - each one half the line. thusly:

A: so feel the destroyed and rip!
B: rip to blood the failing!

you've already got a whole lot of enjambment here, so maybe that doesn't work as much, but thats just the general feel that the meter gives me. maybe for a different poem.

I like it a lot. It's broken, it's violent, and it's shrill, just like the art of war and the experience of war. I mean what are the myths you're referencing here? Achilles (war), David (battle), and Beowulf (battle). This type of meter seems to work really well with subjects that are either inherently shrill or caustic to think about, such as war, or if one wants to present a subject in a caustic or shrill manner. However, I think there is more to this meter than just that it is abrasive. It's somewhat grandiose. The rolling iambs give these lines a sense of majesty already (think Romantic blank verse or Elizabethan poetry) but the double accented syllables give us a state of emergency, or importance, or emphasis. It's almost as if someone is shouting that second accented syllable, or a gong is playing over it.

I like it a lot, and I'd love to see what you can do with the form.

Have you ever read Alice Oswald's Memorial? It is a memorial poem to all the dead soldiers of the Iliad. It is hauntingly beautiful in and of itself, but perhaps it could provide some inspiration moving forward if you would like to extend it.

My other suggestion for extending the poem might be to play with Homeric similes. It could tie in nicely with your mythic references, and give you another way to add to your imagery.

And swift Achilles kept on coursing on Hector, nonstop as a hound in the mountains starts a fawn from his lair - Iliad Book 22

It took me a second to notice that this was in the form of an Anglo-Saxon poem, making the connection to Beowulf all the stronger. It's also in a curious hexameter, not dactyllic but still, getting that connection to Homer. There's also the Homeric appelative ("breaker of Troy"), and perhaps something of a bibilical repetition (e.g. "shattered song"). This is a piece that is trying very hard to evoke and blur together the literature of several honor cultures, in its contents sounds and forms. The sonics here have received a huge amount of attention not only in the unusual and fastidiously kept meter, but the massive presence of consonance and assonance. I think the alternating rhythm is highly effective here as it provides this micro-pattern of tension. One builds to the halfway of a line before falling off into trochees and redoubling at the line-break. This slots against the roll between the excitement of violence and its brutal after-effects.

To me though, this is a piece that is really struggling beneath the weight of its references and the constriction of its sonic strictures. I'm definitely impressed at how it can take these on in the first place, but when we get to "Glory be to Achilles" I can't help but feel something of an anti-climax. As if we brought in these narratives and cultural traditions and acknowledged the brutality underlying their honor systems, but had nothing better to leave off with than an ironic huzzah. I just feel like there is so much more to say about these traditions and their roles in the modern mind that we got feels somewhat slight compared to what there is out there to be tapped and what this poem (well and carefully constructed as it is) could tap.