The Odyssey

Literary Responses - Other Women as topic

gathered by John McIlvain

Pre-Trojan War Odysseus Penelope Telemachus Other Women Elpenor Demodocus Argos Bibliography

Image source: http://www.beloit.edu/~classics/main/courses/classics100/museum2/art_museum2.html

Calypso | Circe | Helen of Troy

Calypso

Breughel's Calypso and Odysseus (painting)

Max Beckmann's Odysseus and Calypso (painting, 1943)

Calypso's Island (follow link to e-Text full version of poem)

by Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982)

This poem is reminiscent of Odysses's speech to Calypso when he attempts to mollify her after she is ordered to set him free. The poem begins...

I know very well, goddess, she is not beautiful
As you are: could not be. She is a woman,
Mortal, subject to the chances: duty of

Childbed, sorrow that changes cheeks, the tomb--
For unlike you she will grow gray, grow older,
Gray and older, sleep in that small room.

Circe

Circe's men enchant the crew. (vase painting)

Circe has probably generated more responses than any other character of the Odyssey. She appears at in Spenser's Faerie Queen, presiding over the Bower of Bliss. She is also Milton's Comus. She is the anti-Penelope and also the anti-Mary. Ezra Pound makes her the central figure in Canto 1 of the Cantos – an "imitation" to use Lowell's term – of the end of Book 10 and the beginning of book 11. Lowell, himself, wrote several Odyssey inspired poems. Circe has seemed to particularly interest any number of contemporary poets. Most of the following poems are still under copyright. Circe is also the central figure in Eudora Welty's story of the same name. The story captures a Circe some of the poems capture as well – a haunted, isolated figure wanting to know the mystery, alien to her, that mortals (especially men – pigs who deserve to look like them) seem to share.

Circe (follow link to complete e-Text)

by Louis MacNeice (1907-1963)

"...vitreamque Circen"

Something of glass about her, of dead water,
Chills and holds us, . . . 

This despair of crystal brilliance."

Note: "...vitreamque Circen" from Horace's 17th poem in his first Ode is a phrase
(almost a Horatian epithet) that seems to have resisted translation and has
haunted more than one poet: vitream is of the sea, glass and glimmering, thus
MacNiece's "of glass" (the color of dead water. . . despair) and "crystal
brilliance." In the ode a poet in beautiful natural surroundings will sing of
"Penelope and vitreamque Circen;" both were painfully in love with Odysseus.

from Circe/Mud Poems (follow link to e-Text)

by Margaret Atwood (1939- )

comment: the essence of this poem is contained in the line:

"One day you simply appeared in your stupid boat"

Circe's Power (follow link to e-Text - scroll down the page)

by Louise Glück (1943- ) who wrote a series on the Circe theme - read them all at PoemHunter.com

The poem begin...

"I never turned anyone into a pig.
Some people are pigs; I make them
Look like pigs. . . ."

Circe (in The Handless Maiden, out of print)

by Vicki Feaver

Circe (in The World's Wife: Poems, Picador, 1999 - available at Amazon.com - the book is illustrated)

by Carol Ann Duffy (1955- ), recommended by Rebecca Olmstead
"an outpouring of horrific gloating violence" - from a review by Laurie Smith in MAGMA (online: http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=4292).
Reprinted in: The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Fourteenth Annual Collection, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, available in serveral editions from Amazon.com.

Circe (students can add comments after reading this poem online; follow the link below to another online version)

by Augusta Davies Webster (1837-1894)

Circe (On the painting by Dosso Dossi) (follow links to e-Text and painting)

by A. D. Hope (1907-2000)

The poem contains these lines..

... She sits among her lovers dazed with grief,
Bewildered by the charge of alien blood...

Note: Dossi did two paintings of Circe – from the poem it is easy to tell that Hope is referring to the one linked to above.

Helen of Troy

Helen of Troy has inspired many poems, but she has a limited role in the Odyssey. This poem seems to capture some of the personality she brings to Book Four.

from Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing (follow link to complete e-Text)

by Margaret Atwood (1939 -)

This poem allows Helen to speak for herself, a somewhat different Helen than most myth-tellers imagine. It contains these lines...

"My mother was raped by a holy swan.
You believe that? You can take me out to dinner.
That's what we tell all the husbands.
There sure are a lot of dangerous birds around."

Responses to the Odyssey