The beep of a heart monitor doesn’t sound like a lyre. The antiseptic sting of an ICU in Queens bears little resemblance to the wind-swept plains of Troy. Yet, in the National Geographic documentary The First Wave, Dr. Nathalie Dougé finds the thread that stitches them together.
It is a thin, bloody thread, but it holds.
Dr. Dougé, a member of the Society of Classical Poets, features prominently in this film by Matthew Heineman. The documentary doesn’t look away. It stares unblinkingly at the first four months of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City, capturing a level of devastation that statistics often scrub clean. We see the fear. We hear the labored breathing.
And amidst the PPE and the exhaustion, we hear Homer.
COVID 19 historical perspective
The Ancient Patient Zero
Most remember The Iliad for the wooden horse or the rage of Achilles. They forget how it begins. It doesn’t start with a duel. It starts with a sickness.
Agamemnon insults the priest of Apollo, and the god responds not with thunder, but with contagion. Dr. Dougé reads these opening lines, and suddenly, the distance between 8th century BC and 2020 AD collapses.
“The fleet in view he twanged his deadly bow, And hissing fly the feathered fates below. On mules and dogs the infection first began; At last the vengeful arrows fixed in man.”
The translation she selects (Pope’s rhyming couplets) emphasizes the auditory terror of the plague. The “hissing” of the arrows mimics the hiss of oxygen tanks, the mechanical sigh of ventilators. In the hospital corridors of the Bronx and Queens, the “vengeful arrows” were invisible, but the bodies they felled were not.
Poetry as Triage
Why turn to an epic poem when the world is ending?
For Dr. Dougé, an internal medicine physician, the choice seems less about escapism and more about recognition. Modern medical charts are dry. They record O2 saturation, heart rate, viral load. They do not record the “anger,” the “grief,” or the divine cruelty of a plague that strikes indiscriminately.
Homer does.
By reciting these lines, she grants the suffering a scale that matches its intensity. The pandemic wasn’t just a logistical failure or a biological event; it was an epic tragedy. The dead were not just numbers; they were the “mules and dogs” and finally the men, struck down by something they could not see or fight.
TheEndurance of the Verse
The Society of Classical Poets has long argued that formal poetry isn’t a museum piece. It is a functional tool for the human spirit.
In The First Wave, Dr. Dougé proves this. She stands in the eye of the storm-a storm that stripped the world of its normalcy-and uses an ancient cadence to keep her footing. The documentary serves as a grim archive of what happened, but Dr. Dougé’s reading serves as an interpretation of why it felt so heavy.
Apollo’s arrows eventually stopped falling on the Greeks. The first wave receded. But the poetry remains, a reminder that humanity has survived plagues before, and we have always needed words to describe the silence that follows.
COVID 19 historical perspective
