The Iliad is my favorite of the three great Greco-Roman epics, and deals with the story of Achilles’ blinding anger towards Agamemnon and later Hector. Achilles is a man caught up in a war that swallowed up his entire world, and he has come to fight in it despite having been told by his mother it is foretold he will die if he fights; Achilles dies in the last year of the war, not too long after losing his best friend Patroclus. Stewart wrote this poem before joining the Dardanelles campaign, which happened in the general vicinity of where ancient Troy stood, and the poem addresses Achilles. I grew up with the Greek myths and the Iliad, and the comparisons between both the wars and the soldiers struck me hard.
To me, this poem was a meditation on being engulfed by a war that encompasses your entire world and will most likely kill you. The speaker has not the high ideals of Brooke’s “The Soldier”, nor the horror of “Dulce Et Decorum Est”, nor even the anger of Sassoon’s “The Poet as Hero”, but a resignation to his fate so reminiscent of the Greek and Trojan heroes of the Iliad. Ever since I read this poem at fifteen, the last two stanzas have haunted me with their heart-breaking simplicity.

I’ve chosen to read the poem rather quietly, for it takes place in the quiet before the storm.