TBook 14
The story of the fall of Troy and the wanderings of the Trojan, Aeneas, the founder of Rome, in Book 14 also touches on the story of the Greek warrior, Odysseus (Ulysses for the Romans). In Homer’s Odyssey, while on his way back home from the Trojan war, Odysseus descends to the Underworld to ask Tiresias for advice. He is told he will get home safely, but then he must take an oar and walk inland until someone asks him about what he is carrying, someone who knows nothing of the sea or the beauty and the evil of the black ships. Only then can he return home and try to live out the rest of his violence-filled life in some kind of peace. My poem imagines how that might play out.
The photograph that illustrates this poem was taken in Ladby, Denmark, at the Viking Burial Ship Museum. It is the only ship burial from the Viking period that you can visit still under its original barrow. I found it an incredibly moving experience, even though it had been emptied of the body and the grave goods shortly after the interment. In the photograph you can see the skeletons of horses and dogs that were sacrificed and buried with the chieftain. In some Viking graves human sacrifices have also been found. Their gods were not the self-sacrificing kind.
The Oar of Odysseus
‘But when you have killed these Suitors in your palace, by stratagem or in a straight fight with the naked sword, you must set out once more. Take a well-cut oar and go on till you reach a people who know nothing of the sea.’
Teiresias the blind seer to Odysseus in ‘The Book of the Dead’ , The Odyssey.
Sick with murder and with war,
the push of his wife,
the blind pull of the seer,
plotting an inland course
this time, he takes up his oar
in search of absolution,
in search of innocence in some distant stranger,
far from the loud-roaring sea,
the black ships, the horrors done.
On the vast, ocean-flat
plains of Anatolia,
the dragged oar blade carves waves,
leaves a wake through ancestral
grasslands. Past Ararat,
that upturned hull, the Euphrates
and the Tigris rivers.
Empty, primordial. No one there to ask, ‘What’s that?’
In palm-dense oases,
exhausted he will kneel,
plant his oar there. It will root,
grow straight and then flower:
a tree good for a tall mast,
good for a fast keel.
And that tree bears fruit still.
It grows strong. And the name
of that tree is the tree
of the knowledge of beauty
and the beauty of evil.