#and the intentional choice of past tense working along w double meanings is just so juicy

[seaglassdinosaur]

It’s the lines, “Poseidon’s never helped me before. He wasn’t gonna start now. I would’ve never made it to Hades.”

The first two lines are obviously about him being poisoned, but it’s the fact that Percy talks about himself in the past tense. That he accepts he’s already dead. His father’s never shown up for him in the past, hence the past tense use, and he’s clearly not one to break the pattern. The ‘wasn’t’ though, communicates a kind of passivity. While ‘isn’t’ might suggest an active refusal, (such as: he isn’t going to start now) ‘wasn’t’ feels more like this is something that was never going to happen. The idea was fruitless from the start, and so they need to reassess the way they saw the events leading up to now; it’s almost like Percy is trying to alleviate future feelings of guilt from them, as there was nothing they did wrong, nothing they could have done better. Unlike Athena’s actions of resentment, Poseidon was just entirely uninterested.

The third line is even more interesting, I find. The ‘would’ communicates this reflection on his life, uninterrupted by his impending and accepted death, but it can be read in two ways: one, Percy, escaped from the Chimera wouldn’t make it to Hades because obviously his father doesn’t care enough about him to save him. He would die of poison before making it to LA.

Two though, and more sad, is that even if he were the one making it down the stairs, even if he were at his best, Percy doesn’t believe he could complete the quest. Facing his death in the eyes, Percy recognizes how ill-equipped and inadequate he is, because if he can’t handle the chimera, how could he ever have hoped to make it the rest of the way across the country?