Before “The Shield of Achilles” even begins, its title alludes to Homer's famous Greek epic The Iliad. In particular, the poem references Book XVIII, in which the goddess Thetis visits the workshop of Hephaestos, god of craftspeople. Thetis asks Hephaestos to forge new armor for her son, the great warrior Achilles, who will fight on behalf of the Greeks in the Trojan War.
As the poem opens, Thetis is watching Hephaestos forge her son's shield. The poem's setting is thus implied to be Hephaestos's palace, which sits on Mount Olympus, the highest peak in Greece. Of course, none of this information is stated outright; the audience must be reasonably familiar with The Iliad to understand what's happening. In this way, the allusion also establishes cultural kinship between the speaker and the reader at the poem’s outset.
As Thetis watches Hephaestos, she expects that he will decorate her son's shield with the sort of magnificent scenes that adorn the shield in The Iliad. Homer’s original shield places idealized scenes of everyday life and the natural world alongside valiant battles. Accordingly, as Thetis scans the shield’s surface, she searches for beauty and adventure—for rich natural imagery and “untamed” oceans. She envisions the society that Achilles defends as “marble well-governed cities,” suggesting prosperity, order, integrity, and an appreciation of art.
However, what Thetis finds instead is “an artificial wilderness.” Denoting something that is human-made, the “artificial” landscape is a far cry from “untamed seas.” Similarly, the uncultivated “wilderness” on the shield’s surface contrasts with the “vines and olive trees” that she imagines.
The shield also depicts “a sky like lead.” This simile characterizes the environment as dark, heavy, and oppressive. Further, its comparison to a dull, commonplace metal diminishes the glamour implied by “shining metal.” The poem thus subverts Thetis’s expectations of the shield, creating a juxtaposition between Homer’s portrayal of war and the speaker’s modern reinterpretation.
The opening stanza is written in a modified ballad form, following a vaguely iambic (da-DUM) rhythm that generally contains three stressed beats per line (rather than alternating between three and four stresses, as is customary in ballads). Here is a look at the meter of the first two lines:
She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
The alternating stressed and unstressed syllables create a bouncy rhythm, producing a lighthearted atmosphere. While traditional ballads are made up of quatrains, or four-line stanzas, the first stanza of this poem contains 8 lines. Therefore, it can be seen as two ballad stanzas merged together. Its first quatrain details Thetis’s expectations, while the second describes the modern shield. As such, the modified ballad form reinforces the contrast between these two scenes. The final line of this stanza, however, contains only five syllables:
And a sky like lead.
The succinctness of this line gives the final image an abrupt feel. This effect is heightened by the end-stop that concludes the line, especially given the examples of enjambment that precede it. At the end of many lines within this stanza, enjambment leaves the audience is left wondering what Thetis is looking for, and later, what she finds instead. It therefore creates anticipation, encouraging the audience to read on. Because it allows one line to flow into the next, enjambment produces an accumulation of rhythmic momentum—which then slams into that leaden sky in line 8.
Much like its bouncy rhythm, the rhymes that appear in the opening stanza create a playful mood. For example, end-stops draw attention to the rhyme between “trees” and “seas.” Later, rhyme heightens the reader’s awareness that a grim scene displaces this natural beauty—“lead” appears “instead.” Additional sound play appears in the form of assonance and consonance. For instance, note the repeating long /oh/ sounds in the poem’s first line, as well as the abundance of sibilance and /l/ sounds in this quatrain:
She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
The high concentration of similar sounds creates interest and slows the reader down, drawing the audience into the poem.