What this project is about.
This one is from Book 7.
How long it took to read this (aloud): 14 mins 6s
What it’s “about”: The gift of a javelin that cannot miss is, in fact, a dangerous gift! Also, she should have kicked his ass to the kerb first time round. “When someone shows you who they are” and all that. (i.e. Cephalus was an asshole, and others paid the price.)
Words I didn’t know:
Cornel any tree or shrub of the genus Cornus; dogwood.
Quotable quotes:
Happy I was and would be so today
If gods above us had not changed their will.
AND
I looked for reasons of dark faults in Procns,
And hoped to tempt her chastity with bribes.
To make my playing of the jealous husband
A part that carried weight, Aurora changed
My looks (and I felt strange) . In this disguise
I entered Athens straightly, then to my house:
Nothing misplaced indoors, except the gloom
A house has while it waits an absent master.
AND
Since I was left alone love burned within me
Until I feared my flesh would turn to ashes.
I begged her to forgive me, said my sins
Were all my own, that I would yield to half
The very gifts and bribes I promised her.
When I soothed her pride and closed her wounds
She came to me and for a few short years
We shared the sweetness of another marriage.
AND
The hot dust held his footprints — that was all —
As though he were a spear tossed into air,
A shot of lead whirled from a sling, an arrow
That took its aim from a Gortynian bow.
AND
At this I heard a stirring of dry leaves:
A beast perhaps. I threw my javelin —
And there was Procris with a wounded breast,
Who cried, ‘O by my grief I am undone!’
That was her voice; myself gone mad with terror
Rushed where it came. Her torn dress stained with blood,
I saw her dying, and O what pathos there
To see her hands still try to tear the gift —
Once hers to me — out of her yielding breast.
How it lands to my eco-sensibility: xx
Obvious allusions, ways it was used (that I am aware of already) : xx
What I know I didn’t ‘get’: xx
To my knowledge, who’s used it why/how (RACC): xx
Further research questions: xx
Anything else: xx
Balfour, H. 1921. The Archer’s Bow in the Homeric Poems. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland Vol. 51 (Jul. – Dec., 1921)
marchudson.net 
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