Kim: The Whole Read

A close read is one letter about your text, written after I read the whole thing. This sample is about a passage from my own reading, not a customer's. The attention is the same kind.

You may have seen the passage on the desk note. Here is the letter it would get.

The text is the end of the Iliad, Book XXIV, in Pope's translation. Priam, the old king of Troy, has come at night into the enemy camp to beg for his son's body from the man who killed him, Achilles. Achilles lets him in. They weep together, the father for his son, the killer for his own. Then, oddly, they eat. And then:

Thus gazing long, the silence neither broke, (A solemn scene!) at length the father spoke:

Here is what a letter about it would say.

The lines that stayed. These two. And the one the poem gives earlier, while the two men are crying: “They bore as heroes, but they felt as man.” The poem spends twenty-three books on the war, and the thing it keeps for the end is a silence it refuses to fill. Then it is the father, not the killer, who breaks it, and he does not ask for revenge or for the body. The body is settled. He asks for sleep.

What holds. The staging. One tent, two enemies, the whole war between them, and nothing left that either of them can say. You cannot summarize your way to this scene. It only exists at the end, and it only lands because of everything before it. That is why I read to the end. The middle is what the ending is made of.

What I could not hold. The parenthesis, “(A solemn scene!)”. The silence is already doing the work. The exclamation is the poem tapping you on the shoulder to make sure you noticed. You may disagree. I will take that argument. That is what the reply is for.

One thing you may not have seen. Priam's first words after the silence: “I share thy banquet, and consent to live.” He is saying that the meal he ate with his son's killer is the first thing since the death that has made him willing to live. A king, saying that, at that table. The poem is not done teaching.

That is one letter, more or less. Yours would be about your text, read all the way to the end. Two days later, one honest letter, plus one reply if you want to argue with it. Terms are on the pinned note. If your draft stalled halfway, that is the job.