Conclusion

Summary

At the end of our journey through the simile worlds of five poems, what have we learned about the simile world of epic poetry more broadly? Which characters and situations can be found in each poem? How do the pain, love, hunger, fear, cold, danger, and so forth experienced by those characters differ across poems, and how do they stay the same? How do similes immerse us in those feelings and experiences? The shape of the simile world resembles that of the mythological tales that form the basis of most epic stories, in that both are defined by the tension between a stable core common to every telling and the details that individual narrators change, omit, or create to tell their own unique version of the tale. To a great extent, the narrative in a traditional medium like epic or about a traditional story like the Trojan War is created by these tensions. And similes, a key feature of the epic genre, are framed by expressions that identify sameness and difference as an explicit focus of our attention.