I've been reading a book about World War I (The Somme by Martin Gilbert), and this morning I read about some German ammunition dumps that were destroyed in a British shell barrage on 25 June 1916. One of the places listed was Mametz Wood, which - of course - got me thinking about "Butcher's Tale" and the lines "And the flies come down in Gommecourt, Thiepval / Mametz Wood, and French Verdun." I realized a couple things about these lines.
Listing places (or people) like this is a rhetorical technique called cataloguing. Here, because of the number of places listed, there's a sense of the multitude of flies that are "com[ing] down."
The other thing I realized is that this cataloguing connects (albeit loosely) to the title Odessey and Oracle. Cataloguing is a convention of epic poetry, and a prime example of epic poetry is The Odyssey, which is referenced in the album title.
