Pope writes in rhyming heroic couplets, a form that was standard for ambitious English verse in 1715 but adds considerable distance from Homer's unrhymed hexameters. His diction is elevated and archaic: "what boots it to deplore" (Book 21) and "direful spring / Of woes unnumbered" (Book 1) carry the formality of eighteenth-century literary English. The rhyme scheme forces compression and sometimes inversion, giving the verse a polished, rhetorical quality. Alexander writes in free verse with longer, looser lines. Her Book 6 passage, "The wind scatters some leaves to the ground, but the forest grows others / that flourish," runs across two lines without closure, letting the image breathe rather than snapping it into a couplet. Her register stays contemporary without turning colloquial. Pope took substantial liberties with the Greek, adding rhetorical flourishes and moral commentary that are not in the original. His Book 9 rendering, "My fates long since by Thetis were disclosed, / And each alternate, life or fame, proposed," tidies Achilles' speech into balanced argument, removing the rawness of the original choice. Alexander stays close to the Greek word order and content: her Book 9 version names the alternatives plainly and in sequence, keeping the weight of each option separate. What Pope gains is drive and memorability. His Book 21 speech moves fast and sounds like performance. Alexander gives a reader who wants to know what Homer actually wrote a much closer approximation, though her longer lines occasionally read as deliberate rather than natural.
Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumbered, heavenly goddess, sing!
That wrath which hurled to Pluto's gloomy reign
The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain;
Whose limbs, unburied on the naked shore,
Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore.
Since great Achilles and Atrides strove,
Such was the sovereign doom, and such the will of Jove!
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.