Alice Oswald And The Oral Tradition

Resigned to the interminable deadline-panic hell — the 9am to 9pm shift in St Mary's — I decided a break was in order. After some searching last Thursday evening, I found myself in Topping’s quirkily arranged front room with Alice Oswald, reading and answering questions about her new book, Rhapsody: A Manifesto.

She entered from the back without the ceremony you'd expect from a T.S. Eliot prize winner and began to talk. Not a single whisper from the audience. Dead silence. For the first time in my many visits to Toppings, I noticed how loud the grandfather clock actually was. Oswald had enraptured every single member of the audience, me included. 

Oswald read Classics at Oxford before training as a gardener, an unusual route to becoming one of Britain’s most celebrated poets. Her second collection, Dart, follows a river from source to sea through the voices of those who live and work along it, and won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2002. In Memorial (2011), she stripped Homer’s Iliad of its plot, gods, and heroes, leaving the names of the roughly two hundred men who die in it, each followed by one of Homer’s long similes. She calls the Iliad an “oral cemetery.” Falling Awake won the Costa Poetry Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize, and she served as Oxford Professor of Poetry from 2019. 

Rhapsody grew out of an attempt to “interview” Homer. The book zigzags through ballads, riddles, pibrochs, and sonnets, taking in singers, mourners, storytellers, nightingales, and rivers 

On Thursday she took us on a journey through her book. It starts with the plurality of Homer, the idea that ‘Homer’ is less a lone genius than a long chain of voices, and expands from there. From Scottish postmen to her dislike of metaphor, she set out to explain why the oral tradition works. She lamented its loss in England and was grateful for its survival in Scotland. That felt fitting in a town where, a few doors from the bookshop, centuries of ballads and pipe music belong to the same living tradition she was describing.

Yet the most poignant moment came halfway through. Oswald spoke about the Litai, the Prayers of the Iliad, which Homer pictures as spirits trailing behind devastation, offering to heal the damage for anyone listening. Hear them, and harm will mend. Turn away, and madness will follow for the rest of your days. She pointed out that our world currently feels a bit mad.

The point, I think, is that the Litai only work if someone is willing to hear them. The same is true of the oral tradition itself. A poem that lives in the air and the memory survives only as long as listeners, and a tradition that depends on being heard is easy to lose. For an evening in St Andrews, a room full of people did exactly that. They listened in a silence so complete that the only sound was the clock.

Illustration by Holly Ward