Alexander writes in verse, though without a fixed meter: her lines vary considerably in length and lean toward a plain, close-to-literal English. The opening "Wrath, sing, goddess, of the ruinous wrath" keeps the Greek word order and the blunt fronting of "wrath," while Graves opens Book 1 with "Sing, Mountain Goddess, sing through me / That anger which most ruinously," a rhyming couplet that softens the abruptness of the Greek. Graves deploys rhyme throughout, which gives his version a song-like, almost ballad quality. His register shifts register too: in Book 21, Achilles tells the young Trojan "look at me! Did you ever see so strong or so handsome a man?" The colloquial "did you ever" has no stiffness at all, where Alexander keeps a formal elevation: "Do you not see how magnificent and mighty I am." Alexander follows the Greek closely and consistently. In the "leaves" passage she renders four lines of Greek into four English lines, keeping the literal comparison. Graves condenses the same lines into a short rhyming stanza: "All forest leaves are born to die / All mortal men the same," then adds an entire extra stanza about autumn that has no counterpart in the Greek. His version adds imagery and mood; Alexander removes nothing and adds nothing. In the Book 9 fate speech, Graves casts Thetis's prophecy as a formal verse oracle with the heading "Twin fates dispute your death, heroic son," a framing device Alexander drops entirely. Graves reads as a performance text shaped for the ear; Alexander reads as a scholarly tool shaped for the page.
Wrath—sing, goddess, of the ruinous wrath of Peleus' son Achilles,
that inflicted woes without number upon the Achaeans,
hurled forth to Hades many strong souls of warriors
and rendered their bodies prey for the dogs,
for all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished;
sing from when they two first stood in conflict—
Atreus' son, lord of men, and godlike Achilles.
Sing, Mountain Goddess, sing through me
That anger which most ruinously
Inflamed Achilles, Peleus' son,
And which, before the tale was done,
Had glutted Hell with champions—bold,
Stern spirits by the thousandfold;
Ravens and dogs their corpses ate
For thus did Zeus, who watched their fate,
See his resolve, first taken when
Proud Agamemnon, King of men,
An insult on Achilles cast,
Achieve accomplishment at last.