The Odyssey

Poetics

Terms and Conventions Poetics Figurative Language Structure Who's who Places Themes Overview

Image source: http://www.beloit.edu/~classics/main/courses/classics100/museum2/art_museum2.html

Note: This site is designed to be used with Robert Fagles' translation of the Odyssey, published by Penguin USA. It was prepared for a 9th grade English class.

Meter

The Odyssey was written in a dactylic hexameter. Each line of the epic has 6 metrical feet, or small groups of sound. The first five feet are dactyls which are composed of a long sound and 2 short sounds. The last foot of each line is always a spondee which is made up of 2 long sounds. The Greek version of The Iliad follows these rules exactly, but only a few English translations have tried to follow it. English has stresses rather than long and short sounds. Fagels commented, "Once you get that Greek hexameter in your ear, it becomes the most gorgeous line of poetry ever conceived . . . .And the more it lodges, the more you realize there's nothing like it in English and you mustn't try to reproduce it." The Fagles translation employs a six beat line, but he varies this to achieve a "range in rhythm, pace, and tone."

Formal Speech

In the Odyssey the characters tend to make speeches rather than have conversations. (An exception to this is some of the dialogue between the suitors and between the suitors and Telemachus in Book 20.) Many of these speeches can be long and at times formulaic, and some parts can be repeated word for word at another point in the poem. The most startling example occurs when Odysseus repeats Agamemnon's plea for Achilles to back to fight for the Achaeans in the Iliad.

Imagery

Some of my students have wondered how Homer could possibly have been blind. He visualizes everything from Athena's blazing eyes to the wind dark sea to Alcinous' palace:

A radiance as strong as the moon came flooding
through the high roofed halls of generous Alcinous.
Walls plated in bronze, crowned with a circling frieze
glazed as blue as lapis ran to left and right
from outer gates to the deepest court recess
and solid gold doors enclosed the palace.
Up from the bronze threshold sliver doorposts rose
with silver lintel above, and golden handles, too.
And dogs of gold and silver were stationed on either side.

Homer's imagery is vivid. He gives us extraordinary detail. Antinous was not just shot with an arrow - "the point went stabbing clean through the soft neck and out/ and off to the side he pitched, the cup dropped from his grasp/as the shaft sank home/the man's life-blood came spurting from his nostrils." Although Homer does give descriptions of settings (for instance the gardens of Calypso and Alcinous), he characteristically brings them to life. "The West wind always breathing through will bring some fruits to the bud and others warm to ripeness." When we read about Alcinous' "teaming vineyard," we see "the vintage grapes lie baking in the sun while pickers gather others."

Nothing in Homer remains static for long. Probably the best known example of his bringing an object to life is the description in the Iliad of the shield of Achilles. A story lurks behind everything, and Homer loves to tell stories (see narrative drift); his pictures are always moving. When Odysseus first saw Alcinous' garden, he "stood, gazing at all this bounty." In the next line he had had his "fill of marveling at it all," and immediately "crossed the threshold/ strode inside the palace." Homer, like Odysseus, seems most at home when something is happening (or, in the case of the digressions, has happened). His people are always doing something: weeping, laughing, eating, crying. They are alive.

Some of Homer's descriptions are clearly hyperbolic, but many of them gives us a sense of what the world of his time must have looked like. Even when it is hard to picture everything he describes - no one seems to have figured out how the axes Odysseus shoots the arrow through line up - we sense it is a failure of our imagination not his powers:

First [Telemachus] planted the axes, digging a long trench,
one for all and trued them all to a line
then tamped the earth to bed them. Wonder took
the revelers: his work so firm, precise
though he'd never seen the axes ranged before.

In addition to letting us see his world, Homer lets us hear it as well. Armor is "clashing in an ungoldly uproar"; At Athena's instigation "mad, hysterical laughter seemed to break from the jaws of strangers"; "the king let loose a howling through the town"; Eumaeus "snarling dogs" emit a "a shatter of barks."

Odyssey Overview