Artwork: Portrait of Homer (1639)
English: The old man honored by a laurel wreath is Homer, the greatest poet of antiquity, identified by the inscription on the sheet of paper with the names of the cities that claimed Homer as a native. This imaginary portrait (no one knows what he looked like) is not so much a celebration of the author of the early Greek epic poems- The Iliad and The Odyssey- but of the fame that a poet could achieve. This splendid painting is dated but not signed. The forceful modeling suggests a Flemish painter influenced by Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610). It hangs in Walters Art Museum.

Biography of Homer

Homer poet (an excerpt from https://www.poemhunter.com/homer/biography/)
In the Western classical tradition, Homer is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.

When he lived is controversial. Herodotus estimates that Homer lived 400 years before Herodotus' own time, which would place him at around 850 BC; while other ancient sources claim that he lived much nearer to the supposed time of the Trojan War, in the early 12th century BC

The formative influence played by the Homeric epics in shaping Greek culture was widely recognized, and Homer was described as the teacher of Greece. Homer's works, which are about fifty percent speeches, provided models in persuasive speaking and writing that were emulated throughout the ancient and Medieval Greek worlds. Fragments of Homer account for nearly half of all identifiable Greek literary papyrus finds.

Homeric dialect

The language used by Homer is an archaic version of Ionic Greek, with admixtures from certain other dialects, such as Aeolic Greek. It later served as the basis of Epic Greek, the language of epic poetry, typically in dactylic hexameter.

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One day I'll be brave and tackle an epic poem. However, today is not that day, as I am swamped with Alaska Nanook Hockey banquet set up and the banquet itself. I managed to get the poem written but had no internet access to post until we got home, just before midnight. Thus, the time stamp here will reflect April 2nd. For the record though, I wrote the poem in the afternoon between my many banquet tasks.

Thanks for reading! Kim

(April 1st), I honor Homer with a Pleiades poem.

(Excerpt from Shadowpoetry.com)

This titled form was invented in 1999 by Craig Tigerman, Sol Magazine's Lead Editor. Only one word is allowed in the title followed by a single seven-line stanza. The first word in each line begins with the same letter as the title. Hortensia Anderson, a popular haiku and tanka poet, added her own requirement of restricting the line length to six syllables.

Background of the Pleiades: The Pleiades is a star cluster in the constellation Taurus. It is a cluster of stars identified by the ancients, mentioned by Homer in about 750 B.C and Hesiod in about 700 B.C. Six of the stars are readily visible to the naked eye; depending on visibility conditions between nine and twelve stars can be seen. Modern astronomers note that the cluster contains over 500 stars. The ancients named these stars the seven sisters: Alcyone, Asterope, Celaeno, Electra, Maia, Merope, and Tygeta; nearby are the clearly visible parents, Atlas and Pleione.

The poetic form The Pleiades is aptly named: the seven lines can be said to represent the seven sisters, and the six syllables represent the nearly invisible nature of one sister.

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