James Allen - Iliadic Territory: Homer's Insurgence into Duggan's "The Watchers on Gallipoli" lyrics

INTRODUCTION Iliadic citation and allusion by modern war poets has a special resonance when their contemporary battlefields are a stone's throw from Homer's own Trojan plains. In this scenario ancient and modern texts are brought alongside one another for direct comparison, regardless of the chronological disparity between them. Such literature can be conceived of as part of a cohesive, synchronic group, where geographical a**ociation promotes intertextual relationships. First, reception theory will be used to illustrate that texts of any period can be implicated in the present whether we approach them from a reader's or a writer's perspective, endowing them with contemporaneity. Applicability of such theory will be explored through the lens of poetry of the Great War's Gallipoli campaign. Having established the Gallipoli poets' propensity to evoke literature rooted in this geographical vicinity, G.C. Duggan's The Watchers on Gallipoli will be addressed. If Homeric credentials can be established, we can question their implications. Duggan's poem engages with the Iliad by constructing allusive similes and obituaries, and sharing a concern with the d**h of youths. For Duggan, writing about the campaign in which his brothers died, as well as for those who fought there themselves, Homer would have been more pertinently evoked than at any other front of the Great War, given the proximity of Gallipoli and Troy. PAST MEETS PRESENT Two aspects of reception theory are central to justifying the cohesion of chronologically disparate literature. First, Jauss's Rezeptionsästhetik prioritises the reader, a**erting that a text is actually ‘the point of departure for its aesthetic effect' since only when perceived by a reader does it acquire full meaning, being ‘hermeneutically related to the horizon of expectations'. The reader's horizon of expectation – rules and norms derived from existing texts as well as contemporary and local customs – is therefore crucial to the meaning of the work. On this model ‘the sharp distinction between antiquity itself and its reception over the centuries is dissolved' for the past becomes implicated in the present by the precepts brought by the reader. This implication of any text in the present is the first way in which we can argue that literature becomes contemporaneous. The second pertains to composition. Intertextual techniques ‘range from direct, conscious citation by one author of another, to an a**imilation of certain methodological approaches, to much more elusive uses relying on subtle allusions (intentionally interwoven by the author) and echoes (of which even the author may not be aware)'. Focus on conscious a**imilation is consistent with Hardwick's definition of reception as the intellectual process involved in selecting, imitating, and adapting ancient works. Goff uses a push-pull metaphor differentiating between the unwitting influence of tradition and the active process of reception. Our interest lies with the ‘pulling' model where the cla**ical object is appropriated by the modern text, and ‘may be put to work in the service of various projects.' Recalling the heroes of Homer's Troy, for example, may function as ‘a powerful source of solace and as a guarantor of the worthiness of the present sacrifice' while the valour of the Homeric heroes could demonstrate ‘the essential nobility and prowess of the modern soldiers.' HOMER IN THE DARDANELLES For the duration of this study, our focus will be on the relationship between the Iliad and the poetry of the Gallipoli campaign of 1915. This campaign was a failed attempt by the Allied forces to secure the sea route between Europe and Russia during WW1.The campaign involved a Naval attempt on the Dardanelles Straits as well as a subsequent land attack on the Gallipoli peninsula by the British, the French, and the Australian and New Zealand Army Crops (ANZAC). Neither the initial landings, nor the subsequent landings at Sulva Bay nor the advance on Sari Bair were effectual. Troops were largely pinned down at their landing spots by the entrenched Ottoman opposition. After heavy casualties, evacuation began in December 1915. The battlegrounds were geographically close to the identified site of Homer's Troy, where swords clashed many thousands of years before. Hence we might expect Homer to be ‘pulled' especially into texts which are rooted in Gallipoli, with its strong cla**ical a**ociations. Oxland in ‘Outward Bound', stating that the ‘self-same winds shall bear us' from the Gulf of Saros as did the ‘hosts of Menelaus',8 makes explicit the parallel between the Greek and modern forces. The anonymous poem ‘The Dardanelles' declares ‘we are not lone / there are other graves by the Dardanelles, Men whom immortal Homer sang.' so too uniting Homeric and modern warriors. The parallel is enhanced as we read that the dead ‘Come to our ghostly campfires', ‘greet us as brothers' and the declaration ‘So to our deeds old Troy rang.' Evocation of the sound of battles past and interaction with the dead of Troy are two motifs commonly deployed by Gallipoli poets. Babington forges the same connection by addressing his fallen contemporaries: ‘Dead! You sleep in goodly company / Who fought and died in ages long ago'. In doing so he collapses the distinction between the plains of Troy and Gallipoli peninsula completely. His implication that the dead of Homer and of the Gallipoli campaign lie in d**h side by side is a testament to poets' willingness to treat ancient Troy and the Gallipoli peninsula, geographically proximate but separated by the Hellespont, as one location. Evidently the link between combat in Gallipoli and combat on the plains of Troy did not go unnoticed by such war poets; in a poem of some 600 lines, this is explored in the most sustained way in Duggan's allusive and emotive poem The Watchers on Gallipoli. HOMERIC ENCOUNTERS IN THE WATCHERS ON GALLIPOLI The poem is a 43 page work, published in 1921 as a dedication to Duggan's two brothers George (Royal Irish Fusiliers) and Jack (5th Royal Irish Regiment) who both died at Sulva in August 1915. Following a dedication to them, the poem is structured in several titled sections including “The Hosting” and “the Landing”. Duggan's work is a little-read piece of substantial length within which Homer acquires a special prominence. We see in The Watchers on Gallipoli incorporation of Homeric characters, allusion to the Greek fleet, Homeric similes, obituaries and focus on the d**h of youths. To establish his Homeric credentials, rather than ipsissima verba replication, Duggan reprocesses characters of the Iliad: ...The Heroes stir In their lone beds by reedy Scamander, And Helen's beauty lives again to see These western strangers, and Andromache Dreams of her Hector and Astyanax. Integration with Homer's characters is forged to the point where, even looking at the words on the page, the ‘western strangers' are framed by Iliadic characters, above, alongside and below them. Perhaps there is also an echo of Brooke's line ‘They say Achilles in the darkness stirred'. Emblematic of Duggan's approach, the Iliad is evoked, but incorporation is mediated by the influence of other poets. Chronologically remote reference points are alive in the same lines. Having established that we are operating in an Homeric sphere of allusion, this invites and legitimates Homeric readings of lines such as ‘Borne east in the dark ships...' which evokes the journey of the Greeks to Troy and specifically the Iliad's . In the section entitled ‘The Hosting' the idea of recurrent eastern campaigning is developed. Reading ‘And the darkened troop ships bear them / Due eastward once again' we also infer comparison with the Greek fleet. Furthermore, in a poem divided into sections and concerned with Homer, it is difficult not to see a section entitled ‘the Hosting', which describes the gathering of the army at the start of the work, as an an*logue for Iliad II. Structurally, the poem's division into numbered sections is reminiscent of the Alexandrian division of the Iliad into books. This is supported by the opening of section four: ‘So were they gathered...' This opening has an unmistakably Homeric feel because eight books of the Iliad open with the Greek equivalent . Yet Homer is most pervasively refigured through Duggan's similes: ...Like a breaking wave they toss High up the ridge – its spray drifts across The summit rainbow-hued... Similarly, Iliad 15.381-4 equates the attacking Trojans to a wave overwhelming a ship's gunwale. Numerous Homeric wave similes make Duggan's as much a simile in the Homeric mould as direct allusion. Yet Duggan also appropriates a specific Homeric simile in order to illustrate the casualties inflicted during the landing: And in that quiet morning, outside a ruthless door, Men's souls went up to God like chaff from off d**h's threshing-floor. Out went the stars, and life went out, but clearer burned the flame Of courage in men's hearts. Through choke of bloodstained sea they came, Up mine-strewn beaches, over webs of steel, and on the sand Men's bodies lay like bundled wheat dropped from the reaper's hand. Relentless attack and the final simile allude to the Achaeans and Trojans slaughtering each other like reapers levelling wheat (Il. 11.67-71): ‘As reapers facing one another from opposite sides drive their swathes through a rich man's field of wheat or barley and the handfuls fall thick and fast, so the Trojans and Achaeans leapt on one another and slaughtered, nor did either side take thought of ruinous flight...' Hainsworth argues that Book 11, specifically this simile, constitutes a turning point for the nature of warfare in the Iliad. While Books 3-8 narrated individual combat, truces, and burial of the dead, at this point ‘All that now disappears...There is a horrendous list of casualties, in quantity on the Trojan side, in quality on the Achaean' with this simile used to communicate the shift to blanket slaughter. To a poet whose undertaking was to describe a war characterised by machine guns and other individual operated weapons capable of inflicting ma** slaughter, and whose conception of war was mediated by Homer, the image of a reaper cropping numerous blades of wheat with one weapon may have seemed particularly poignant. The reaping motif recurs at Iliad 18.550-557 where, preceded by the ambush and siege ecphrasis, it is at tension with depictions of war. So in the Iliad reaping is also used to highlight a perversion of the true balance. But the simile itself also has a richer literary pedigree. It is not only prominent because of its ‘almost programmatic position in the book' but because in Catullus LXIV the Fates express Achilles' martial prowess thus (Cat. 64,353-5): namque velut densas praecerpens messor aristas sole sub ardenti flauentia demetit arua, Troigenum infesto prosternet corpora ferro. ‘For as a reaper lopping off the close-packed corn ears beneath the burning sun reaps golden-yellow ploughland, he shall cut down with raised steel bodies of Trojan born...' The layers of meaning with which the original text is branded by every generation of readers are crucial. Catullus's redeployment reinforces the a**ociation of the reaper simile with ma**acre of many by one. Consider too that Jason in the Argonautica ‘reaps' the soldiers he has sown (3.1386-91) (though perhaps such a simile suggests itself given how the soldiers were created).Thus we must note that Homer is not refigured independently of intermediary authors. Given the above, it is natural that the simile did not suggest itself to Duggan alone. Isaac Rosenberg in August 1914 writes of ‘A burnt space through ripe fields' (Stallworthy, 1984), on which Hardwick comments that ‘The image has no direct impact for those who know no Homer. For those who do, the image brings out the horror latent in Homer...'. Her argument is that more unsettling allusions to Homer are drawn out as the indiscriminate bloodshed of war increased, an argument which pertains to Duggan as well as to Rosenberg. At the end of section VI, the conclusion of ‘The Landing', stands an obituary. Like Oswald's Memorial, Duggan seems to ‘Homerize' by seizing upon the most striking elements of Homer's narrative. Duggan's reference to local native land, the contrast to their place of d**h, and idea of never again seeing one's homeland are all common obituary components in the Iliad (See a litany of examples in quick succession at Iliad 5.43ff ‘And Idomeneus slew Phaestus, son of Borus the Maeonian, who had come from deep soiled Tarne…'): Here from a battered hulk men steal across the dead who ne'er Will see again Cork's rising hills or hear the winds of Clare. And this is theirs – a little space upon the southern spit, A cove whence hills rise steeply up, and in that space is writ A song that sweeps tumultuous upon the harp of years, A tale that sets the blood aflame and fills the eyes with tears... Duggan's simile exploits the ‘far from home' motif and most recalls Achilles's boast over Iphition, given its contrast of place of d**h with idyllic homeland (Il. 20.389-92): ‘Low you lie, son of Otrynteus, of all men most daunting; here is your d**h, though your birth was by the Gygaean lake, where is the estate of your fathers, by Hyllus that teems with fish, and eddying Hermus.' The pa**ages have parallels not only with each other, but also with sepulchral epigram, which the Iliad's obituaries are posited to prefigure. Conventionally such epigrams are six lines or less; Identification of the deceased and their homeland are primary characteristics. Duggan adapts his to accommodate multiple d**hs and Irish heritage, which is characteristic of Duggan's allusive style. The harp might also have similar dual connotations, being both the heraldic emblem of Ireland and a stringed instrument akin to the bard's lyre. At Iliad 17.300 Hippothous also falls far from his homeland Larissa. The brevity of his life is noted – a third motif picked up by Duggan. The ‘d**h of youths', a shared anxiety or reprocessed theme, predominates in both Homer and Duggan. Often the youth or grace of combatants is stressed in the Iliad, particularly at their moment of d**h. Priam's declaration makes a combination of youth and d**h seem most natural (Il.22.71-3): ‘For a young man it is wholly fitting, when he is slain in battle, to lie mangled by the sharp bronze; dead though he is, all is fair that can be seen.' Such a d**h is exemplified by Euphorbus at Iliad 17.45-60. His neck is tender, his hair as elegant as that of the Graces. He is compared in a touching simile to an isolated olive sapling, blossoming and full of promise, which is uprooted by a tempest. Pathos is aroused and brutality evoked by this contrast of sapling and storm. Duggan shares this sensitive focus on youths encountering d**h when he writes of the ‘too brief life' of ‘young men who / Have grown to soldierhood' or of ‘young-born armies setting forth to die', or even laments ‘Oh, young adventurers'. In this case, a sense of interconnectedness between Homer and Duggan is forged not by migration of words, but of theme. That Duggan's interests remained with drawing parallels to the ancient world is, however, affirmed by the way he repeatedly evokes it. For example the cheeks of dying men are equated to the hewn marble in shattered temples (p.21), and soldiers in the twilight ‘gleam like gods of marble' (p. 35). Imbued with such emblems, Duggan's text roots itself amongst relics of the ancient world. More complex, still, is Duggan's blending of such ancient media with his reception of Homer. Consider the uniting of Homeric phraseology with the image of the gods supervising battle: ...It has come to nought – The long day's toil. Three times they strove, and thrice The gods that watch o'er war threw down the dice Which flung their hope away. The ‘three times' motif echoes pa**ages such as Iliad 16.702-3 when Patroclus thrice sets foot on the corner of the wall and is thrice repulsed by Apollo. Vandiver infers from this pa**age a connection with Iliad 22.209-13, where the fates of Achilles and Hector are weighed before combat. While I agree that the gods' weighing of Hector and Achilles's fates is evoked by ‘gods that watch o'er', Duggan's warriors are frustrated by dice throws, not scales. Either an emblem of justice is being replaced by instruments of chance, or the image conceived of here is rooted in the Homeric world, but not taken exclusively from the Iliad, mediated by the depiction of Achilles and Ajax at dice, most famous from the Black Figure amphora of the Exekias painter. Oblique reception of Homer may also be discernible through Duggan's metrical choice. Section II is most interesting given Duggan's choice of iambic rhyming couplets. This same metre was used by Pope in his translation of the Iliad. As with the vase, we may deem this an evocation of the Iliad, but through an intermediary profoundly a**ociated with it. As an act of reception it is remarkable and supports the notion that reception of a text is contextualised by intermediaries, this being reception of a reception of the Iliad. It also demonstrates that one can create something with a ‘Homeric feel' without pure recourse to the original. It is tempting to reflect on why Homer acquires a special prominence within Duggan's poem. Given the programmatic dedication, one explanation may be that Homer features so heavily because of the poet's desire to memorialise his brothers. The desire to commemorate a martial feat with a literary memorial is offered no earlier precedent than Homer. Duggan prefaces his poem thus: To my brothers George and Jack, 10th (Irish) Division, k**ed at Sulva, 16th August, 1915– This Memorial. Perhaps there is no more poignant an image of the Iliad's preoccupation with commemorating the martial feats of men in song than Achilles in Book 9 found playing a clear-toned lyre (itself a martial spoil) and singing the . Consequently, given the paratext's stated interest in ‘memorial' and the programmatic second line ‘all the glory that desire could want', I argue that the Iliad's suitability as a precedent first justifies its prominence. Secondly, this location of Gallipoli forged a geographical bond between the ancient and modern soldiers. It is perhaps for this reason that Duggan's geographical terminology is at times contemporary – ‘the clefts of Sari Bair' – and at times Iliadic – ‘on far-off Ida's valley.' Were Duggan not ‘Homerizing', Kaz Dağı, the modern Turkish, might be more consistent with his other Turkish place names. Thirdly, it has been suggested that despite the differences between mechanised and ancient warfare, ‘Homeric epic provided a set of images, characters and tropes, in effect a whole shared vocabulary, for soldier-poets struggling to articulate and understand their own war.' Duggan seems explicitly to test the limits of Homer's applicability as a comparandum when he writes: ...men's breath Comes quick, so quickly that men pant to hear The screaming of shells chant aloud in the ear, The cry of men fighting that makes the earth reel, The cheer of their comrades, the clash of bright steel. The cry of men bears semblance to the Homeric epithet , suggesting a similar conception of battle, though this Homeric martial cry is juxtaposed with innovations of mechanised warfare. One could argue that the contrast of weaponry tests how far the Homeric war-cry fits into the context of modern warfare. Conversely, if determined to see the text as uncompromisingly Iliadic, one could a**ert that Duggan's combination of weapons of different ages in a text is no different to Homer's famous incorporation of the pre-10th c. BC boar's tusk helmet alongside weapons contemporary with the Iliad's composition. Later, dreams of glory are interrupted by anchor chains sinking through hawse-holes which ‘break the spell.' Such challenges to Iliadic moments preclude the conclusion that Duggan's undertaking is tantamount to unadulterated import of an ancient text into the modern. The Iliad pervades and colours Duggan's poem, with clear signals in the paratext and opening lines of glorifying, memorialising and Homerising. As a monument to the d**hs of his brothers, this seems uncontroversial. Through import of Homeric reaping simile and obituary of youths the preliminary a**ertion follows that Duggan endows his text with a poignant martial brutality and pathos. THE GALLIPOLI CONTINGENT The most conspicuous way in which the notion of an exclusive collapsed comparison does not hold is in the author's inclusion of non-Homeric texts. Duggan writes acknowledging a comprehensive spectrum between Homer and his poem; the texts are refigured together, not independently. The programmatic opening reveals Duggan's range of reference. Allusion to the Iliad is prominent, but not exclusive. Stanza one establishes the place as ‘a haunt / of all the glory that desire could want.' Glory may be Iliadic, but we must take ‘Argosies' of the following stanza, literally large merchant ships, as a play on the word ‘Argo', confirmed by ‘the golden fleece'. ‘Sailed this way' then indicates that local geography will be the unifying factor, while ‘script of Greece' hints that the sources are literary. With Homer and Apollonius' Argonautica initially referenced, ‘Helen' and ‘Ilion' return us to Iliadic Troy before the ‘tramp of Persian hordes' and the ‘bridge of boats' conjure Herodotus. ‘Alexander' alongside the ‘script of Greece' suggests Arrian or Plutarch, then come the ‘new adventurers.' Not only is a programmatic introduction a healthy cla**ical technique, this opening also reveals the importance of constantly seeing the adventurers in the context of Homer as well as the intermediaries that bring us to the present day. That Duggan's concern is with literature relating to the peninsula is affirmed by: On these seas lay brooding poets' tales of wonder, Venice with her navies, Mede and Argonaut. ‘Venice with her navies' makes reference to the Fourth Crusade for which Venice supplied the fleet. The Fourth Crusade never reached the Holy Land, and resulted in excommunication of the participants and the destruction of the Imperial Library at Constantinople. The literary cost of losing this library is perhaps understood when Duggan writes that crusaders filled Byzantium ‘With fire and murder till its streets grew dumb'. Duggan can therefore be seen to characterise Gallipoli as home of misdirected campaigns, and, in asking ‘are these the new crusaders?', he envisages the modern soldiers as another errant force. The ‘Persian hordes' also failed in their undertaking and in such a context we may we be led to conceive of Troy as site of a prolonged siege with great loss of life in exchange for little material gain. By simultaneously evoking literature that spans the peninsula's history, Duggan is able to forge a more complex message than one of unequivocal glorification. Duggan recognises the famous disappointment of the Gallipoli campaign through the precedent of historical local an*logues but because Homer is the model, his implicit message is that the dead are still worthy of ‘glory' or glamour'. Hence Duggan both accepts and emphasises the failure of the army while still commemorating and glorifying his brothers with ‘this memorial,' achieved here through simultaneous interaction with Gallipoli-located texts, some glorious, some ambivalent. While Duggan's interest in memorial and programmatic statement about glory incline us to the Homeric, his explicit debt is to Masefield's account of the campaign, ‘Gallipoli'. Against the romantic notions of glory on the battlefield, we might expect the factual narrative account to weigh on the text. Reading month names at section breaks 50 we recognise Masefield's section divisions running in parallel, ‘April, the Landing' and ‘May, The First Offensive' for example. Further, we appreciate a seasonality which is atypical of the Iliad, where action takes place over a matter of days. Contrast two pa**ages explicitly treating the same offensive: Lancashire landing, Sedd-el-Bahr, beaches and bluffs that ring With a fierce undying one day's spell and an agelong glorying, Where life was naught and d**h was life and men gave all to win A hand's breath on a barren coast to take their slumber in! Phrases like ‘fierce undying' and ‘agelong glorying' might even encourage us to think of this as the regiment's aristeia. Contrast this with Masefield's report of ‘The Landing at W Beach' where 1st Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers ‘were landed at six in the morning from ship's boats...On landing, they rushed the wire entanglements...with heavy loss, and won to the dead ground under the cliffs.' Yet the conflict between Masefield's and Homer's influence is only illusory. Hoffenberg wrote that Masefield's prose ‘captured the tragic and profound convergence of youth, d**h, sacrifice, adventure, daring and camaraderie.' So while pa**ages such as the Lancashire landing appear more detail-orientated and factual in the Masefield account, Masefield is equally prone to stressing the beauty of youths who died and their heroism. 'For physical beauty and nobility of bearing', Masefield writes, 'they surpa**ed any men I have ever seen; they walked and looked like the kings in old poems' and later concludes that ‘no army in history has made a more heroic attack'. So Masefield too was inclined to heroise the troops. The inclination to equate soldiers to Homer's heroes is perhaps the most common habit of the other Gallipoli poets, against whom lastly we evaluate Duggan. Justifying the tendency is the understanding that ‘action could be regarded as meaningful, even sacred, when it was sanctified by the traditional canons of heroic behaviour.' Hence in Adams's ‘The Trojan War, 1915' we read: Homeric wars are fought again By men who like old Greeks can die; Australian backblock heroes are slain , With Hector and Achilles lie The simile unites ‘old' Greeks and ANZACs despite the temporal gulf between them. Further integration is achieved by the image of these Australian heroes lying alongside Hector and Achilles. Australians lying with heroes, not anonymous fallen warriors, are implicitly shown to be worthy of hero status. Duggan's approach is well aligned with Adams's, who heroises through evocation of Iliadic characters, but similarities with C.E. Byles's ‘Graves in Gallipoli' are far more comprehensive. The slain in Byles's poem are equated once more to Homeric heroes in the simile ‘as e'er Achilles did, or Diomede.' ‘Valorous deed' and ‘e'er' are examples of language deemed by Fussell to be raised or aggrandising in the context of writing about the First World War. Phrases such as ‘life was naught' in The Watchers on Gallipoli are indicative of how it is permeated with such language as well. Though Byles writes a comparatively short Petrarchan sonnet, within its bounds he evinces an interest in Homer and the Persian Wars, while predominating themes are valour, the dead of Gallipoli and their memorial. The final six lines, in length, their self-contained message, and sense resemble sepulchral epigram. They open ‘If, wayfarer, thy steps should haply trace...these sad hills...' and conclude ‘Great hearts died here for Britain's sake.' So they recall perhaps the most famous epigram ‘Go tell the Spartans, thou who pa**es by, / That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.'(Herodotus VII, 228, Bowles translation) through common address to a pa**erby, recognition of d**h for a sovereign state and common focus on ‘here' or ‘the place / Whereon thou standest.' In writing a sonnet perhaps Byles recalls one of the most famous ‘Graves in Gallipoli', that of Brooke who famously wrote a collection of sonnets on the war and died en route to Gallipoli. So we see an*logue in the approach of poets concerned with the same location, further evidence that heroisation and geographical relevance invited Homeric interaction. And yet the response of the poets writing on or from Gallipoli and who look to Homer is not entirely h*mogeneous. Binyon initially treats the ancient heroes as nothing more than an ‘unattainable day-dream' from ‘days of a vanished world, days of grandeur perished'. Their temporal and conceptual distance from contemporary soldiers is exemplified by the opening lines of the second stanza: We beheld them as presences moving beautiful and swift In the radiant morning of Time As in Duggan the diction is ‘high' – they are ‘doers of deeds' and ‘d**h is nought.' ‘Radiant' aggrandises, while ‘morning of Time' implies a gulf between then and now. But following their a**ault on the beach which ‘Not all the gods of heaven's miraculous panoply could have hindered,' the unattainable past standard is completely rea**essed. They ‘stab', the most traditional form of fighting, but ultimately the soldiers surpa** their forerunners' pale achievements: Now to the old twilight and pale legendary glories, By our own youth outdone, Those shores recede; not there, but in memory everlasting The immortal heights were won. Aside from the stylistic and thematic correspondences with Duggan, the complex message of worthy memorialisation despite the failure is encoded – heights of glorious memory but not the topographical heights were attained. Yet here emerges a common alternative message, that modern soldiers surpa** the ancient. Leon Gellert's ‘Again the clash is East' also establishes a parallel with Homer's Troy; ancient is again surpa**ed as ‘The rolling echoes of old Troy arise / With trebled sound...' His most poignant contrast between modern and ancient warfare appears in the bathetic conclusion to the catalogue of Troy's martial sounds: The blows that burst on Agamemnon's shield, Or echoed from Achilles' threshing sword Were weak and small. Enjambment of ‘weak and small' helps engineer a fine anticlimax which stands in balanced contrast to the enjambed ‘trebled sound' six lines above. Gellert proceeds to compare the ancient war with the ‘mighty blast' of his time. Rather than an inspiring ‘clash of bright steel', crossed swords here seem ‘like tinklings of a timid past.' The ancient conflict is diminished similarly, if less onomatopoeically, by Brooke when Achilles and Hector stir to ‘More than Olympian thunder on the sea.' So can Homer either be redeployed as a direct frame of reference, through which soldiers can be cla**ed as heroes, or as a legendary benchmark which modern soldiers surpa**. It is commonly observed that ‘In the early twentieth century, the British public-school curriculum laid a heavy emphasis upon cla**ics, and many grammar schools, too, had robust cla**ics programmes.' As such appropriation of Homer in Shaw-Stewart's ‘I saw a man this morning' seems a natural sequitur to his distinguished cla**ical career at Eton and Oxford. The poem is rife with cla**ical allusion, most notably play on Helen's name66 which evokes Aeschylus's Agamemnon 681-90. Once again the site of Gallipoli inspires Iliadic comparisons. The poet compares his ‘three days' peace' to Achilles's withdrawal from battle. ‘Achilles came to Troyland / And I to Chersonese' further maps their experiences onto one another, while questioning ‘Was it so hard, Achilles, / So very hard to die?' implies that Achilles's experiences might be an*logous to the narrator's own. But for all interaction with the Iliad, Shaw-Stewart subverts in order to stress his own pa**ivity. Achilles withdrew from battle, while Shaw-Stewart was recalled from leave, and the unanswered question ‘Why must I follow thee?' demonstrates his lack of active agency. The final lines ‘Stand in the Trench, Achilles, / Flamecapped and shout for me.' allude to Iliad 18.203-29 but go furthest in their subversion of the heroic paradigm. Achilles's flame-cap is a divine gift, Shaw-Stewart has no such favour. Achilles stood over the trench routing the Trojans with his war cry, Shaw-Stewart asks him to descend into it where the less formidable modern soldiers hide. We finish on a most poignant emblem of the war, and one which first surfaced in the Iliad. Dying Gorgythion at Iliad 8.306-8 is compared to a poppy: ‘And his head bowed to one side like a poppy that in a garden is heavy with its fruit and the rains of spring; so his head bowed to one side, weighed down by his helmet.' The a**ociation between the poppy drooping and pathos-fraught d**h of an individual is enhanced by Virgil's employment of the same imagery to describe the d**h of young Euryalus at Aen. 9,433-437. The aestheticism of the simile, which bestows beauty upon the d**h of the individual, is subverted by Gellert who concludes his poem ‘Poppies': But when the charge was done, they found him there Deep in the redness, where he'd made his stand, With withered poppies in his twisted hair, And poppies in his hand. Adjective choice - ‘withered' and ‘twisted' - first negates the beauty implied by the poppy. Secondly, the abundance of poppies seems indicative of countless pathetic d**hs in the same mould. Once more Homer is evoked as precedent, once more a history of reception is involved, once more the diachronic distinction is broken down as present and past are implicated in one another and once more, finally, do we see the benchmark established by the Iliad surpa**ed in order to evoke greater depth of suffering to the reader whose horizon of expectation incorporated Homer. CONCLUSION To memorialise his brothers, Duggan casts his poem as an Iliadic text, famous for its preoccupation with undying memory attained through glorious military feats – an alluring precedent given Duggan's aims, which are betrayed by the paratext and first two lines. The conclusion can stand that Homeric citation and allusion imbue Duggan's poem with glory and pathos, and that they forge a channel into a reservoir of martial connotations, but we must acknowledge the non-Homeric too. By referencing texts which narrate failed campaigns and which were bound to Gallipoli by geography, Duggan achieves these ends without sidestepping the campaign's infamous failure. This serves as a microcosmic representation of how a geographical boundary stimulates further literary integration. Gellert and Byles challenge and redeploy Homer respectively, but observation of these interrelationships alone is enough to support the same broad conclusion that Gallipoli poets place a dependence on implicating Homeric text in the modern. We have nowhere seen simple translation, but rather selection, imitation, and adaptation in order to endow the writers' texts with a more penetrating resonance. Yet we saw that reception of lite rature is contingent not just on bipartite relationships, but more comprehensive interactions, emblematised by the reaping simile with its depth of meaning acquired through a growing web of a**ociations of which Duggan becomes a thread.