What this project is about.
This one is from Book 12.
How long it took to read this (aloud): 10 mins 39s
What it’s “about”: The clue is in the title
Words I didn’t know: xx
Quotable quotes:
There, where the altar fires flashed through darkness
They saw a blue-green dragon climb a tree,
Whose highest branches held eight nested birds,
Their mother circling over them in terror
The hungry dragon made short work of them;
All nine went down his throat, a single mouthful.
The Greeks were curious and ill at ease;
Thestorides, their prophet, had an answer:
“This means we win the war, my darling Greeks,
Troy shall go down, but not too soon. We have
A longer job than you might think.” He read
Nine birds gone as nine more years of war.
The dragon, though still twined in green tree branches,
Turned into lapis lazuli, and hung
Preserved forever as a green-stone serpent.
AND
King Agamemnon, while her servants wept,
Took Iphigenia to a blood-stained altar
Where she was well prepared to give her life.
Even the goddess felt something go wrong:
She wrapped a fog around them, closed their eyes,
And as the scene grew slightly mad with weeping,
She placed a red-haired doe upon the altar — –
So someone said — and spared Mycenae’s child.
Then, since Diana had her share of blood,
For as she cooled, the sea itself grew calm,
The thousand ships took sail — and after many
Small misadventures reached Phrygian shores
AND
Rumour, sometimes mistaken for great Fame,
More often dressed as Notoriety, lives there,
A mountain-round-house tower is her home:
Innumerable doorways all around it,
A thousand entrances, exits, arcades,
And none with doors. Or night or day
The place keeps open house, and its brass walls
Reflect the lightest word, the lowest whisper;
The place is never silent, never noisy,
Yet full of voices, like the sounds of waves
Heard from a lighthouse set a mile inshore,
Or like the stilled and trembling trail of sound
Jove’s thunder leaves after black clouds collide.
AND
Through tower halls the Many come to talk,
Lies twisted into truth, truth into lies;
All come and go, and gossip never ends.
Talk, talk, talk, talk fills many hundred ears
That empty as a story’s told, rehashed,
And told to someone else, or fiction grows;
Each time retold adds what is heard
To what’s been said before.
AND
Then as the sword-edge touched
His body, it turned dull and the Achilles
Clanged, beat at Cygnus’ headpiece with a sword-hilt,
Cygnus retreating, backing from the blows,
Until fear took him; and black shadows came
To make him blind, to make him stumble backward
Over an unseen rock, while the Achilles
With a last thrust was on him, teanng at
Helmet where laces held it to the throat,
And the Achilles’ iron hand cut off his breath.
Cygnus seemed dead, but as half-spent Achilles
Stripped off the armour, nothingness was there;
A white sea bird flew into air above it,
For Neptune made him bird which took his name.
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
marchudson.net 
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