Pope writes in heroic couplets, the dominant English verse form of his era, with iambic pentameter pulled tight by end rhyme. The effect is polished and compressed: where the Greek takes seven lines to open, Pope takes eight and loses several details entirely, including Chryses and his ransom. His diction is consistently elevated, drawing on classical English poetic convention, so "direful spring / Of woes unnumbered" reads as ceremonial rather than conversational. Verity writes in longer, unrhymed lines that follow the Greek more closely in structure and word count. His register is contemporary without being casual: "the accursed anger which brought the Achaeans countless agonies" lands as plain speech. In the leaves passage (Book 6), Pope's couplets give the lines a symmetrical finish, "now green in youth, now withering on the ground," while Verity's version reads closer to the pace of spoken explanation. Pope was working in the early eighteenth century, and his translation added material, adjusted tone, and shaped Homer toward the taste of his literary moment. He removes Achilles' full dilemma speech in Book 9 to six crisp lines, gaining compression but dropping the specific phrase about homecoming. Verity, a classical scholar, stays close to the Greek syntax and its repeated structures. In Book 21, Verity keeps "who was a far better man than you," a phrase that is blunt in both Greek and English. Pope softens nothing but reshapes everything into rhetoric: "The great, the good Patroclus is no more!" has an orator's cadence the Greek does not. A reader who wants Homer's argument intact will find it in Verity. A reader who wants English verse that performs independently as a poem will find it in Pope.
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, goddess, the anger of Achilles, Peleus' son,
the accursed anger which brought the Achaeans countless
agonies and hurled many mighty shades of heroes into Hades,
causing them to become the prey of dogs and
all kinds of birds; and the plan of Zeus was fulfilled.
Sing from the time the two men were first divided in strife—
Atreus' son, lord of men, and glorious Achilles.