Cirrus@Austlit

Dedication: This poem is dedicated to all the Important Male Influences, dead or alive, who have been playfully utilised in the writing of this Epic. The title remodels that of Homer's The Iliad; The verse form (blank verse) has been lifted from Virgil's Aeneid (and many other worthy later users, such as Shakespeare and Milton); The idea of putting the title of The Iliad to humorous use is pinched from Alexander Pope and his 'The Dunciad', a satirical epic on (male) dunces; The mock-heroic tone is inspired by 'The Rape of the Lock', a trivial (male) quest described in heroic terms, also by Alexander Pope; The Writer tying herself to the chair to resist the call of Hunger laughs at Homer's story of the irresistible call of the Sirens; and the Strait of Love Lack recalls the story of Scylla and Charyribdis. Both are in The Odyssey; Two lines in the stanza on Hunger ('past reason hated, as a swallowed bait / on purpose laid to make the taker mad') have been lifted from Shakespeare's sonnet 129, a poem on (male) lust. The verses are unchanged; the joke is in the change of context; Sleep, the Knot of Perfect Traps, plays with Sir Philip Sidney's sonnet 'Come Sleep, O Sleep, the perfect knot of peace'; Many ancient and less ancient myths and quest stories are remembered in this poem: The Iliad, The Odyssey, Beowulf, Sinbad the Sailor, Gerusalemme Liberata, Apollonius of Tyre, Pericles, The Lord of the Rings... one of them female; The ending takes liberties with the famous final lines of T.S. Eliot's 'The Hollow Men', a poem on the First World War and the futility of wars.