Penelope's true response is only to the frail shade of her husband, hovering in the gentle wave-like rhythm of "the listing hull of a driftwood ship". But the suitors, bringing seduction in the guise of consolation, are tricked as well. Stanza four works with the logic of the turn, beginning with the evocation of Odysseus's supposed death at sea, and contrasting it with the assertion that "I hold the living near to me, saved". It shows Penelope's despair overflowing into physical infidelity. "Wanton grief", almost an oxymoron, is the phrase which provides the emotional hinge. But the narrative unfolds a little differently. We imagine a woman wasting away and faithful to the end. At the start of The Bed That Is a Tree, when Penelope imagines herself a corpse, the bed is also a deathbed.
The bed, rooted because Odysseus had made the post from a living olive tree, symbolised immovable fidelity. It was when Odysseus described the construction of the marriage-bed that Penelope recognised the ragged stranger as her husband. Impasse occurs only when, finally, instead of "the wire in the reed", there is merely "the wire", like an exposed and painful nerve.
In Lasky's poem, Penelope's very thoughts are an obsessive weaving and unweaving, yet the narrative always moves forward on its own small odyssey. Homer's Penelope unravelled by night the shroud she wove by day part of a ploy to keep her suitors at bay. For example, the absence of the expected punctuation in the last line of stanza two (before "my love"), followed by the surprise stanzaic splitting between "my love" and "I kept you well", strongly emphasises the sexual overtones of the claim. "The musk in the box", "the wire in the reed" and of course "the bed that is a tree" are images carefully planted to grow into powerful erotic metaphors. Penelope's maintenance involves both the physical and imaginative aspects of love. The well-kept husband might not be materially supported, but he would have every wifely attention he desired. In Lasky's poem, with its female narrator, the phrase "kept you well" and the following similes take on subtly different colouration. The subject of the original threnody seems likely to have been a wife rather than husband. True to the spirit of Homer and epic poetry, anaphora serves this lyric beautifully, keeping it minutely connected, building the rhythm, and intensifying the mood.
I kept you as a silver lamp which lit up this house." The poem is infused with this lament, which is particularly appropriate in its reference to the loom ("the wire in the reed"). I kept you as musk in the box, as wire in the reed. The quoted "scraps of lament" are from the beginning of an actual threnos: "My love I loved you well, I kept you well. Her speech fittingly draws on the threnos, the keen sung as part of ancient Greek funeral rites. Like Penelope is throughout most of the Odyssey, Lasky's Penelope is convinced her husband is dead.
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