except in the hands of a great master of song, blank verse is
apt to be tedious, and Lord Carnarvon's use of the weak ending, his habit
of closing the line with an unimportant word, is hardly consistent with
the stateliness of an epic, however valuable it might be in dramatic
verse. Now and then, also, Lord Carnarvon exaggerates the value of the
Homeric adjective, and for one word in the Greek gives us a whole line in
the English. The simple [Greek text], for instance, is converted into
'And when the shades of evening fall around,' in the second book, and
elsewhere purely decorative epithets are expanded into elaborate
descriptions. However, there are many pleasing qualities in Lord
Carnarvon's verse, and though it may not contain much subtlety of melody,
still it has often a charm and sweetness of its own.

The description of Calypso's garden, for example, is excellent:

Around the grotto grew a goodly grove,
Alder, and poplar, and the cypress sweet;
And the deep-winged sea-birds found their haunt,
And owls and hawks, and long-tongued cormorants,
Who joy to live upon the briny flood.
And o'er the face of the deep cave a vine
Wove its wild tangles and clustering grapes.
Four fountains too, each from the other turned,
Poured their white waters, whilst the grassy meads
Bloomed with the parsley and the violet's flower.

The story of the Cyclops is not very well told. The grotesque humour of
the Giant's promise hardly appears in

Thee then, Noman, last of all
Will I devour, and this thy gift shall be,

and the bitter play on words Odysseus makes, the pun on [Greek text], in
fact, is not noticed. The idyll of Nausicaa, however, is very gracefully
translated, and there is a great deal that is delightful in the Circe
episode. For simplicity of diction this is also very good:

So to Olympus through the woody isle
Hermes departed, and I went my way
To Circe's halls, sore troubled in my mind.
But by the fair-tressed Goddess' gate I stood,
And called upon her, and she heard my voice,
And forth she came and oped the shining doors
And bade me in; and sad at heart I went.
Then did she set me on a stately chair,
Studded with silver nails of cunning work,
With footstool for my feet, and mixed a draught
Of her foul witcheries in golden cup,
For evil was her purpose. From her hand
I took the cup and drained it to the dregs,
Nor felt the m