Alexander writes in verse, and the line breaks create pauses that prose cannot. Her opening puts "Wrath" alone at the start, a single word before the rest arrives. Murray's prose runs continuously: "The wrath sing, goddess, of Peleus' son, Achilles, that destructive wrath which brought countless woes." The sentence accumulates without stopping. Alexander's diction is contemporary without being casual. Murray's carries older register throughout, visible in Book 5 where he writes "fear thou not Ares" and "so present a helper am I to thee," constructions that belong to early twentieth-century literary English. Alexander gives "do not fear Ares on this account," which is plain modern speech. Neither version is colloquial, but the distance between them is audible in almost every sentence. Murray's translation, published in 1924 as part of the Loeb Classical Library series, follows the Greek closely and preserves its additive, coordinating structure. His Book 9 passage includes almost every clause Achilles speaks, with "neither shall the doom of death come soon upon me" matching the Greek directly. Alexander is more selective. Her Book 6 leaves passage ends at "it dies," cutting the transition into Glaucus's genealogy. That removal keeps the image clean but drops the connective tissue Homer uses. Murray's Book 21 death speech keeps "how comely and how tall," which is more literal to the Greek's physical terms. Alexander gives "magnificent and mighty," which reads faster but moves away from the body. Each translation makes a different trade between following the text and moving the reader forward.
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.
The wrath sing, goddess, of Peleus' son, Achilles, that destructive wrath which brought countless woes upon the Achaeans, and sent forth to Hades many valiant souls of heroes, and made them themselves spoil for dogs and every bird; thus the plan of Zeus came to fulfillment, from the time when first they parted in strife Atreus' son, king of men, and brilliant Achilles.