Pope writes in heroic couplets throughout, keeping a formal, elevated register that stays consistent from the opening invocation to the death scene in Book 21. His diction is consciously archaic: "direful spring," "Pluto's gloomy reign," "foredoom'd to die." Graves writes in prose for the narrative and dialogue passages, but switches to rhymed verse when a character speaks in verse in the Greek, as in Achilles' Book 9 speech, where Thetis's prophecy becomes a quatrain: "Either to stand fast on the Trojan shore / Until you die, renowned for evermore." In the Book 6 leaves passage, Pope gives six end-stopped couplets of steady iambic pentameter, while Graves breaks into short rhyming stanzas with a folk-song feel: "All forest leaves are born to die; / All mortal men the same." Pope's translation prioritizes rhetorical grandeur and readability for an educated eighteenth-century audience comfortable with formal verse. He expands and polishes: the brief, blunt Greek of Achilles in Book 21, where Achilles tells Lycaon to stop moaning and simply die, gets rounded into a speech about mortality that sounds prepared. Graves keeps the colloquial pressure of that moment: "Yes, friend, including you. Why bemoan your lot?" The sentence is short and dismissive, closer to the Greek's tone. Pope's version gains cumulative force and music; it loses abruptness. Graves's prose moves quickly and reads accessibly, but the mixed form, prose plus inserted verse, can feel inconsistent across long stretches. Each approach reflects a different assumption about what reading Homer in English should feel like.
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!
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.