Free Standing Shelving

Identify a Homeric Simile?

I need help identifying a Homeric Simile in this excerpt from The Odyssey. I have scanned it over a few times and I am not able to identify any. Please help? And no, this is not doing all the work for me. I still have to write a paper on the simile, I just need help identifying it. The Homeric simile is an extended comparison between something unfamiliar, such as an epic event, and something ordinary with which the audience is familiar. Epic from The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Robert Fitzgerald Two nights, two days, in the solid deep-sea swell he drifted, many times awaiting death, until with shining ringlets in the East the dawn confirmed a third day, breaking clear over a high and windless sea; and mounting a rolling wave he caught a glimpse of land. What a dear welcome thing life seems to children whose father, in the extremity, recovers after some weakening and malignant illness: his pangs are gone, the gods have delivered him. So dear and welcome to Odysseus the sight of land, of woodland, on that morning. It made him swim again, to get a foothold on solid ground. But when he came in earshot he heard the trampling roar of sea on rock, where combers, rising shoreward, thudded down on the sucking ebb-all sheeted with salt foam. Here were no coves or harborage or shelter, only steep headlands, rockfallen reefs and crags. Odysseus' knees grew slack, his heart faint, a heaviness came over him, and he said: "A cruel turn, this. Never had I thought to see this land, but Zeus has let me see it- and let me, too, traverse the Western Ocean- only to find no exit from these breakers. Here are sharp rocks off shore, and the sea a smother rushing around them; rock face rising sheer from deep water; nowhere could I stand up on my two feet and fight free of the welter. No matter how I try it, the surf may throw me against the cliffside; no good fighting there. If I swim down the coast, outside the breakers, I may find shelving shore and quiet water- but what if another gale comes on to blow? Then I go cursing out to sea once more. Or then again, some shark of Amphitritê's may hunt me, sent by the genius of the deep. I know how he who makes earth tremble hates me." During this meditation a heavy surge was taking him, in fact, straight on the rocks. He had been flayed there, and his bones broken, had not gray-eyed Athena instructed him: he gripped a rock-ledge with both hands in passing and held on, groaning, as the surge went by, to keep clear of its breaking. Then the backwash hit him, ripping him under and far out. An octopus, when you drag one from his chamber, comes up with suckers full of tiny stones: Odysseus left the skin of his great hands torn on that rock-ledge as the wave submerged him. And now at last Odysseus would have perished, battered inhumanly, but he had the gift of self-possession from gray-eyed Athena. So, when the backwash spewed him up again, he swam out and along, and scanned the coast for some landspit that made a breakwater. Lo and behold, the mouth of a calm river at length came into view, with level shores unbroken, free from rock, shielded from wind- by far the best place he had found. But as he felt the current flowing seaward he prayed in his heart: "O hear me, lord of the stream: how sorely I depend upon your mercy! derelict as I am by the sea's anger. Is he not sacred, even to the gods, the wandering man who comes, as I have come, in weariness before your knees, your waters? Here is your servant; lord, have mercy on me."

Public Comments

1. O hear me, lord of the stream: how sorely I depend upon your mercy! derelict as I am by the sea's anger. Is he not sacred, even to the gods, the wandering man who comes, as I have come, in weariness before your knees, your waters? Here is your servant; lord, have mercy on me."