International Journal of Multidisciplinary Consortium
Volume – 1 | Issue – 4 | December 2014
[email protected]| http://ijmc.rtmonline.in | ISSN
2349-073X
USE OF THE CLASSICAL MYTH IN W.H.AUDEN’S
THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES
By
BSL Shilpa | Faculty | Maharaja Agrasen Institute of Management, Rohini, Delhi
ABSTRACT
Many writers have interwoven myths into their literary creations. The paper aims to
examine how W.H Auden has reinterpreted an ancient myth in the light of the modern
context in his most anthologized poem “The Shield of Achilles”. The paper introduces the
concept of myth and focuses on the multi-dimensional use of myth in the poem. With the
poetic genius of Auden, myths acquires a new significance and acts as a powerful tool
through which Auden can explore the socio-religious reality of the current times.
KEYWORDS: Myth, W.H.Auden, The Shield of Achilles, Modernist poetry
INTRODUCTION
Myths have been extensively used by poets at all times. But, with the coming of
modernism the use of myths acquire an unprecedented importance in the works of
modernist writers. The most important modernist writers such as T.S.Eliot as in his poem
The Waste Land, W.B.Yeats’ in his Adam’s Curse, Leda and Swan, and Second
Coming, and W.H.Auden’s poem The Shield of Achilles have elaborately used myths in
their poems to achieve a variety of purposes.
Then it is important for us to understand what myths are. A myth is an archetype of the
past. It is a pattern of a model or a prototype. Northrop Fry, one of the most important
forerunner of archetypal criticism, defines myths as “Myth is a drive towards a verbal
circumference of human experience”. He also adds that “In terms of narrative, myth is the
imitation of actions near or at conceivable limits of desire”. Allan, W.Watts, “Myth is a
complex of stories some, no doubt fact and some fantasy”. Primarily they are the
expressions of a community. Although we are not always aware of the role of myths for a
community, it does play a significant role in holding a community together in common
psychological and spiritual activities. C.Rajgopalachari in the preface to the sixth edition
of the Mahabharatha says “Mythology is an integral part of the religion and national
culture as the skin and skeleton that preserve a fruit with its juice and its taste form is no
less essential than substance… Mythology and folklore are necessary for any great culture
to rest on the stable spiritual foundation and function as a life-giving inspiration and
guide”.
THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES
Published by: Modern Rohini Education Society
| Paper Id:
043668
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International Journal of Multidisciplinary Consortium
Volume – 1 | Issue – 4 | December 2014
[email protected]| http://ijmc.rtmonline.in | ISSN
2349-073X
The Shield of Achilles belongs to W.H.Auden’s volume of poetry with the same name.
The Shield of Achilles published in 1955 was written in alternating seven-line stanzas of
rime royal (ABABBCC) and eight-line stanzas in a ballad format (ABCBDEFE).
The subject of the poem is derived from Homer’s Iliad, an ancient epic poem covering an
important part of the Trojan War. Homer in the eighteenth book of Illiad tells us the story
of how Achilles’ lost his shield that he had lent to his dearest friend Patroclus, who was
killed at war by Hector and who later appropriated Achilles’s shield. Goddess Thetis, the
mother of Achilles, asks the god Hephaestos to create a shield for her heroic son so that he
can triumph in the war against Troy.
In the original description of Homer’s Illiad, Homer gives a detailed description of the
famous armour-making scene, where he describes how Hephaestos forges the shield of
Achilles on the behest of Thetis, with the scenes of an idyllic world that is delightful and
pleasant and hence very different from the dreary world of war. The shield portrays a
mighty Greek civilization that stands on the fundamentals of diligence, love, success,
happiness and morality. It represents simple pleasures of life that mark the golden world.
The shield with all these pleasant scenes is a reminder that the world beyond war is
endearing, and hence is a break from the harsh cruelties of the war.
Auden takes this myth and obviously reworks the famous armour-creation scene of the
Iliad. He rewrites a response to Homer’s myth as if it was an attempt to give Homer a
modern world’s response to the antiquated myth. The poem being a response to the old
myth, is also reflected in the fact that Achilles’ shield is said to have nine layers or
concentric circles and this numerical nine being symbolic of the nine layers is well shown
in the fact that Auden’s poem also has nine stanzas. So, in a way the myth is used to create
a striking contrast between the world of the ancient Greeks and the contemporary world.
The poem clearly presents a stark contrast between mythic world of Homer - admirable
and appealing-and the modern world - repulsive and abhorrent.
The poem being a juxto-position of the idyllic Greek past and the present. Stanzas one,
four, seven, and nine are set squarely in ancient Greece and they are introduced to the
expectations of Thetis from Hephaestos. The other stanzas, in which the scenes of modern
life are presented in detail, are quite different. The striking contrast is impossible to be
missed as the movement between stanzas focused on Thetis’s innocent expectations and
those focused on the harsh realities depicted on the shield.
Thetis hopes to see olive trees and vines and marble cities and ships on windy seas, but
Hephaestos has forged “an artificial wilderness” under a leaden sky. The plain too is
barren without vegetation. But, yet a great multitude of boots stand ready waiting to go for
war. A faceless voice with dry statistics explaining the need for war is sufficient to get the
men marching forth. So the poet in the first contrast tells us how the delights of olives,
vines and marbles are replaced with artificial heaviness, which brings forth the futility,
emptiness and nothingness of the modern world.
Published by: Modern Rohini Education Society
| Paper Id:
043668
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International Journal of Multidisciplinary Consortium
Volume – 1 | Issue – 4 | December 2014
[email protected]| http://ijmc.rtmonline.in | ISSN
2349-073X
In the next contrast, we see how Thetis expects to see scenes of religious piety, which
should alleviate human soul, but is instead disappointed to see Hephaestos’ depiction of
the dehumanizing human experience of war where there is a barbed military camp, death
of enemy prisoners who die losing their pride, ad helpless civilian onlookers of the sad
events of war.
Thetis looked over the shoulders of Hephaestos a third time over while he works, again
expecting to see athletes and dancers enjoying games and music, but on the shield there
was a “weed-choked field” instead of a dancing floor. And, a poor child wanders about
alone, aiming a stone at a bird. The world depicted here is the one where it is devoid of all
morals, and where a child’s pass time is a cruel game of throwing a stone at a harmless
bird, where rape and murder seem commonplace, and a palce where children have never
heard of a place where promises are kept and fellow human beings are respected.
Hephaestos limps away, revealing the entire shield to Thetis, who cries out in horror at its
imagery. This is what the armorer decided to put on the shield of Achilles, son of Thetis,
Achilles the man-slayer doomed to soon die.
USE OF MYTH IN THE POEM
T.S. Eliot in his famous essay “Traditional and Individual Talent” expresses how
importance of the sense of past, while he says “This historical sense, which is a sense of
the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is
what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most
acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity”. For modernists, myths
represented a traditional and a cultural past, which they dearly longed for. They mourned
the fact that their generation is uprooted from the past, and hence one of the reasons of
extensive use of myths in the modernist poetry is because, by its use, they are trying to
reclaim the past at least as memory or a reference point. Futility and emptiness mark their
world. And, the philosophy of the modernist poets was that past is of tremendous
importance, and one of the reasons why the poets of the Eliot’s schools used myths, was
because myths represented the glorious past of the civilization.
Auden also uses myth in this poem as a means of creating a striking contrast between the
idyllic world of the Greek past, which is marked by beauty, country dance and provincial
song, and the rites and rituals with the modern world that is precarious and threatening to
the individual life and existence. By placing the Greek past as a backdrop, the poet is able
to describe the modern world and bring forth the appalling realities of his times more
effectively than had he chosen to describe the present without its reference to the mythic
past. Another effect that the writer is able to achieve with the use of the myth is that he
able to situate and to contextualize the harshness of the present times without making the
reader feel gory or dark about the present. Had he just described the present alone, then the
poem would have appeared dark and pessimistic and would not have been able to create
the dramatic effect that he is now able to do it.
Published by: Modern Rohini Education Society
| Paper Id:
043668
Page 90
International Journal of Multidisciplinary Consortium
Volume – 1 | Issue – 4 | December 2014
[email protected]| http://ijmc.rtmonline.in | ISSN
2349-073X
Another aspect that Auden is able to express by using the myth is his own sense of facing
the inevitability, the sense that what is to happen, will happen. The Greek Concept of
fatalism is also something that Auden is able to draw by using the Greek myth. The myth
which shows how each one of them, despite knowing their destinies in the war, have no
choice but to be a part of the war, and can have no escape from what is preordained, so is
the poet describing the current times as he too like Thetis knows the future of the
civilization but also know that there is no escape for them from these bleak times.
Besides, the modernist poets who were influenced by the poetic philosophy of T.S. Eliot,
also believed to achieve great works of art , there is a need to depersonalize the
experience that one is trying to describe or express in one’s work. Explaining this process
of depersonalization, T.S. Eliot says: The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may
partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect
the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind
which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which
are its material.
Auden, here beautifully demonstrates that by the use of myth how he is able to
depersonalize his personal experience of the horrors of the modern world by distancing it
and expressing it through the guise of the myth.
CONCLUSION
Myth has made Auden achieve many effects at once: he is able to create a contrast
between the modern reality and the idyllic past of the Greeks; he is to some extent able to
reclaim the past and thereby create a connection between the uprooted present with its
cultural tradition; he is also able to express his sense of fatalism by accepting the present
reality as being inevitable and hence something that cannot be escaped; and yet at the same
time for his creative process he is able to use the myth to distance the experience of the
current horrors and transfuse them into a unified poetic experience by using the tool of
myths.
REFERENCES
1.
Auden, W. (2000). The Shield of Achilles. In M. H. Greenblatt, The Norton Anthology
of English Literature(Vol.2) (pp. 2511-12). Newyork: W. W. Norton & Company.
2.
Eliot, T. (1921). Tradition and Individual Talent. In T. Eliot, The sacred Wood.
3.
Homer. (n.d.). Illiad. Translated by Butler, Samuel.
4.
Hosain, M. A. (2013). Treatment of Classical Myths by the Modernist Poets: W. H.
Auden’s. The Criterion .
5.
Poetry, A. C. (2003). Roberts Neil. Malden, USA: Blackwell.
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