Pope writes in heroic couplets, rhymed pairs of iambic pentameter, and the effect is immediately formal. Where Rouse opens Book 1 with "An angry man," Pope begins "Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring," and the archaic diction ("direful," "foredoom'd," "boots it") keeps the register elevated throughout. That elevation is consistent: in Book 6, the leaves simile becomes "Now green in youth, now withering on the ground," a line that has its own shape and closure. Rouse's prose carries no such shape. His sentences are plain and variable in length, and his diction shifts from the neutral ("the generations of men") to the bluntly colloquial, most visibly in Book 5, where Athena calls Ares "Mr. Facing-all-ways." Rouse prioritizes readability and speed. He said he aimed to render Homer for a reader who wanted the story, and the passages show that: dialogue moves fast, the narrative does not pause for decoration. What this removes is the weight of the Greek's repeated epithets and its formal structure. Pope, working in the early eighteenth century, adds to the Greek: his Book 21 speech gains a rhetorical shape Homer's Greek does not quite have, with Achilles addressing Lycaon in balanced couplets that sound like set-piece oratory. Rouse's version of the same speech, "Come, my friend, die too; why do you cry like that?", is abrupt and harder. One translation gives the poem grandeur; the other gives it directness.
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!
An angry man—There is my story: The bitter rancour of Achillês, prince of the house of Peleus, which brought a thousand troubles upon the Achaian host. Many a strong soul it sent down to Hadês, and left the heroes themselves a prey to dogs and carrion birds, while the will of God moved on to fulfilment.
It began first of all with a quarrel between my lord King Agamemnon of Atreus' line and the Prince Achillês.