Poem of the Week: “Circe” by Michael Longley

Originally published in Michael Longley’s debut collection, No Continuing City (1969), “Circe” meditates on Homer’s Odyssey. The poem reflects on Circe’s relationship to the shipwrecked sailors who crashed into the shores of her island in a contemporary context. The poem reads, “At first in rock pools I become their wife / Under the dunes at last they lie with me / These are the spring and neap tides of their life.” Written in a first-person point of view, Longley’s poem challenges the traditional perception of Circe, who is often depicted as a predatory, sexually promiscuous figure, offering an alternate, and more empathetic, perspective.

— Virginia Noone, WFU Press Intern

P.S. Compare this poem to “Circe” by Louis MacNeice, which you can read on the WFU Press blog here.

Circe

The cries of the shipwrecked enter my head.
On wildest nights when the torn sky confides
Its face to the sea’s cracked mirror, my bed
– Addressed by the moon and her tortured tides —

Through brainstorm, through nightmare and ocean
Keeps me afloat. Shallows are my coven,
The comfortable margins – in this notion
I stand uncorrected by the sun even.

Out of the night husband after husband
– Eyes wide as oysters, arms full of driftwood –
Wades ashore and puts in at my island.
My necklaces of the sea shells and seaweed,

My skirts of spindrift, sandals of flotsam
Catch the eye of each bridegroom for ever.
Quite forgetful of the widowing calm
My sailors wait through bad and good weather.

At first in rock pools I become their wife,
Under the dunes at last they lie with me –
These are the spring and neap tides of their life.
I have helped so many sailors off the sea,

And, counting no man among my losses,
I have made of my arms and my thighs last rooms
For the irretrievable and capsized –
I extend the sea, its idioms.

— Michael Longley, from Ash Keys: New Selected Poems (2024)