Sea Thoughts from The Odyssey

Extract

These few reflections were suggested by a recent coastwise voyage with the Odyssey as only book-companion, and the sea is the main theme.

The sea, of course, figures largely in the Odyssey, and how true it all is! Clearly Homer was thoroughly familiar with every aspect of sealife, and we may be sure that his Greek audiences down the years found in him a satisfying interpreter of their own experience as members of a seafaring race.

Homer's stock adjectives and verbs are the quintessence of observation, but observation coloured with artistic imagination. His sea-pictures, with all their vividness, are not photographic, or scientific—if that means abstracting and explaining. Let me illustrate.

A net, to anyone who has made or used one, is a perpetual source of wonder. He knows its knots and its changing shapes, but how is he to describe it—universally? Not, certainly, in the terms of Dr. Johnson's dictionary definition: ‘anything reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.’ In the last resort he hails with delight Homer's childlike, invincible, πoλνωπóχ (xxii. 386), for, after all, ‘many holes’ sums up to the eye of imagination the idea of net. True, these ‘holes’ are regularly bounded, but why insist on that when the reader knows it perfectly well and only likes to be re-minded of the general impression? Even Johnson had a glimmering notion that ‘holes’ had something to do with it, for he defines ‘reticulated’ as ‘formed with interstitial vacuities’.