Odyssey 7.84-166

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,

Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,

With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:

There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,

Lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight …

How do these lines of Oberon’s work? Certainly they evoke images with their colours, and more astoundingly, the sniffed-in aromas of flowers—words do have this power of transport in representation, within or outside of verse, though they do not always seem to exercise it. Prompts to the memory, from words or otherwise, seem to be as unpredictable as they may be galvanising or devastating. But the rhythms of poetry and song seem uncannily able to marshal, and spotlight, the power of words. Beyond sight and smell, there is a virtually tactile miming of these floral beings in the rhythmically engaged structures of tongue, palate, throat, and lips, even the saliva. ‘Luscious’ is a luscious word. ‘Oxlips’ come to life in the slowly sibilant saying of them. The nature of words is therefore more than simply referential: in the rhythm of the poet’s lines they become themselves embodied substances. Poets and songwriters remind us of this substance of words, by revealing it.

Homer of course was the original word musician and evoker of substances. Odysseus has been left standing alone on the threshold of the estate of Alcinous in mysterious Phaeacia, contemplating what is within, and Homer does not resist the temptation to join him in conjuring the rhythm of his vista. No speech occurs in this passage, in which he might immerse as an actor; Homer instead invests himself in the sheer description of things that are very hard to relate to anything normal. Hence similes are rare—in fact there is only one—and it is unusually elusive.

Homer has engaged in such contemplation already in the Odyssey; more a propos of Oberon’s lines was the description of Calypso’s eco-cave, as Hermes stood on its threshold in awe and admiration (5.57-74). Earlier than that was Telemachus gaping at Menelaus’ interior space, wondering if this was what Zeus’s front room was like (4.74). It is that encounter which most comes to mind now; once again we hear how Alcinous’ house shone ‘like the light of the sun … or the moon.’ But Phaeacia outdoes anything that Menelaus may have scrounged from Egypt. The structure is made of shining metals, where humbler folk must settle for timbers. The walls and threshold are made of copper, the doorposts silver, and the doors made of gold. Though they are exceptionally extravagant and high tech, the works of art in Alcinous’ house combine form and function, true to the spirit of the Odyssey’s aesthetic philosophy: the dogs crafted of gold and silver, by Hephaestus, actually keep guard; boys made of gold, do in fact hold the torches needed to light the feast. (At a dramatic moment later on, Odysseus himself becomes such a torch-bearer, in his own dinner hall.)

Everything is in excess; this calls forth not similes but proportions, so that one can use the imagination to project scales rather than contemplate striking comparisons. For example, by as much as the men are superior to all others in their know-how at sea-faring, so also superior are the Phaeacian women in the arts of spinning and textiles: the art of the text.

But the topmost splendour (literally topmost) are the seat coverings, the draperies woven by human women. Immediately following the torch-boys made of gold are fifty real slave women, some grinding at the mill, while others weave at the loom and still others sit and spin the wool. It is these last, the slaves in a heavenly textile factory, who call forth the only brief simile: their motion in their seats as they spin is like ‘the leaves on a tall, tapering poplar.’ One does not actually know the tree for sure, or, therefore, the intended motion. Now, when it comes to Homer’s trees and birds, we can only make guesses. Here is a question that is an instant path to desert island metaphysics: how do we know that we each see the same colour orange, or merely call what we see the same name? Homer has no word for ‘blue’, unless it is the pigment of Alcinous’ cornice, called cyanus. The Iliad’s sky is ‘coppered’ or ‘brazen’. I really don’t think that Homer’s sky was the colour of ours. One can only infer that the rhythm of these spinner-women bobbing at their work waved through them like the familiar rustle through the leaves of a tall and handsome tree. Colours, leaves, winds, and women must all be imagined.

Right alongside the work in progress, we see the finished product: the hung linens drip with olive oil. This is a significant feature of the qualities of Phaeacia, this simultaneity. As in art, so in nature: we move into an extraordinary orchard, where the grapes are in flower, ripening, being harvested, being dried, or being trod into wine all at the same time. On the shield of Achilles (Iliad XVIII), the scenes are depicted in sequence, from spring marriages to communal ploughing to summer wars to harvest songs, in a catalogue, although, to be sure, the framing of the shield itself does suspend the separate vignettes in an ever-present. But one feels the passage of time all the same. In the harvest scene in particular, Homer himself sings a singer, a boy playing a lyre who sings the Linos song as the villagers gather the grapes. The harvest song captures the whole in mid-motion, the predicament of people who live in the temperate zones: its tones look back to the bloom of spring, and call a halt to the wars of the summer season, as it accompanies the reaping of the mature fruit. But reaping is killing; the harvest heralds the coming of winter and death. Without being able to hear or understand a word of it, one knows that awareness of the coming cold and bleak infuses the poignant notes of the Linos song.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on …. —Keats

There seems to be no winter in Alcinous’ orchard. Or rather, the fruit trees seem oblivious to it; all the stages of ripening fruit are present at once. I have seen this only once in my life, in what the Kandyans call a kamaranga tree—in the tropics, a region without winter beyond Odysseus’ travels and ken. It is Poseidon who travels among the Aethiopes.

The flowers and new star fruits were on the tree simultaneously with last season’s lot. But all the other fruit trees there seemed to have their seasons, though these weren’t defined by winters. The Phaeacian fantasy is indeed one for the temperate zones which are defined by winter, and so dreams not of no seasons, but for the joys of the other seasons and the absence of that one. Hence in Phaeacia there is none of the looming dearth against which we harvest, but also therefore, none of the beauty of the Linos song unheard.

τάων οὔ ποτε καρπὸς ἀπόλλυται οὐδ’ ἀπολείπει

χείματος οὐδὲ θέρευς, ἐπετήσιος · ἀλλὰ μάλ’ αἰεί

Ζεφυρίη πνείουσα τὰ μὲν φύει, ἄλλα δὲ πέσσει.

ὄγχνη ἐπ’ ὄγχνηι γηράσκει, μῆλον δ’ ἐπὶ μήλωι,

αὐτὰρ ἐπὶ σταφυλῆι σταφυλή, σῦκον δ’ ἐπὶ σύκωι. Odyssey 7.117-21

Of these the fruit never dies, nor even diminishes,

Neither winter nor summer, all year long: no, quite continuously

The Zephyr breathes out of the west, sprouting some, ripening the rest.

Pear grows old upon pear, apple on apple,

But upon a cluster it’s a cluster, and ripening fig on fig.

What in English is pear upon pear, the new upon the ripe, and apple upon apple, is in Greek onkhnē ep’ onkhnēi, mēlon epi mēlōi, nominative upon dative case. Hence there is a change of ending between pear and pear and apple and apple, unlike in English, as well as cluster upon cluster and fig on fig, staphulēi staphulē and sūkon epi sūkōi, creating a complex of rhymes in lines 120-1. It is commonly taught, somewhat proudly following Milton, that the ancients did not ‘do’ end rhymes, as so tenderly executed in Oberon’s couplets above. But just look at the emphatic endings of Homer’s lines, 7.117-21. Even if you can’t sound them out, you can see the rhyming shapes of the syllables at the lines’ ends, printed in bold: ἀπολείπει, αἰεί, πέσσει, followed by μήλωι, σύκωι. There is a song-like quality to these, describing the fecundity of a land that perhaps only exists in song.

Classics students take pride in understanding what they call ‘agreement’, between noun and adjective, which means agreement between case endings. But the audible cue for this agreement is almost always rhyme, rhyming word-endings. The clever ones feel especially clever when they remember that some feminine nouns have masculine declensions, so that the feminine endings on their adjectives do not seem to agree, or that some adjectives don’t have feminine forms, so that feminine nouns have to agree with what look like masculine epithets or predicates. But this classicist’s ethos should not obscure the fact that rhyme—from the perspective of a line, ‘internal’ rhyme—is actually everywhere in Greek and Latin poetry and prose. It is indicative of how tone deaf is the Enlightenment Classics tradition, that it teaches visu...

‘Ripening Fig on Fig’: Homer in English