I love Madeline Miller’s work.

In fact, I’m desperate to teach either The Song of Achilles (2011) or Circe (2018) – either would make wonderful foundations for an A Level student’s coursework. 

Is that a hint? Yes, of course it is!

Both take stories which have been told for thousands of years and move our point of view slightly sideways. Miller gives the centre of the story to someone who has traditionally stood closer to its margins.

In The Song of Achilles, that person is Patroclus.

We know what is going to happen. That is part of the peculiar cruelty of the novel. Achilles cannot escape the story that has already been written for him, nor Patroclus, and neither can we.

But perhaps death isn’t quite the tragedy we assume it to be.

Miller’s line made me think immediately of Tennyson‘s Tithonus – one of a small and not especially dignified collection of texts which have made me cry while teaching them.

Tithonus has been granted immortality, but not eternal youth. Everyone and everything around him remains part of the ordinary cycle of life and death:

Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.¹

His immortality isn’t a blessing. It is exile from the natural condition of being human. He has been denied an ending. It took Tennyson seventeen excruciating years to get some measure of relief from the untimely death of his dear friend, Arthur Hallam. I imagine at times he might have thought he was Tithonus made flesh.

And then, because apparently my brain had decided we were doing this today, I thought of Stephen King‘s The Green Mile.

Its final pages perform a similarly cruel trick. Paul Edgecombe’s extraordinarily long life initially sounds like the thing human beings have always wanted: more time.

But more time means more goodbyes.

And while I was putting today’s image together, another old favourite arrived: Edna St. Vincent Millay‘s Time does not bring relief. (Sonnet II)

The seasons change. Snow melts. Leaves burn. The tides retreat. Nature is very good at moving on.

The speaker isn’t.

There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim.²

What connects all these very different texts for me?

We talk about death as though it must necessarily be the worst thing that can happen. 

Literature isn’t always so certain.

The greater grief belongs to the person left behind.

Often, immortality is a curse.

Sometimes longevity simply gives us more opportunities to lose people.

And sometimes time does not, despite everything we tell one another, bring relief.

Which brings me back to Madeline Miller, on her birthday.

These are ancient stories. We know their endings. We have known them for centuries.

Somehow The Song of Achilles makes us notice other parts of the story, and maybe hope, impossibly, that this time things might be different.

I think Miller understands something the old myths understood too:

Mortality gives love its terrible, but also wonderful urgency.

We don’t get forever.

Maybe that’s not a bad thing …

Join the conversation: tell me about a your favourite ‘re-telling’. What makes it resonate with you?

1. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Tithonus’, available at Poetry Foundation ↩︎
2. Edna St Vincent Millay, “Sonnet II’, available at Poets.org ↩︎