Examples Of Simile In The Odyssey

The epic simile is a common staple of the Homeric epics The Iliad and The Odyssey. What differentiates the epic simile and the simile is that the comparison made in the epic simile is more elaborate – oftentimes embedding other metaphors within the simile itself – and is drawn out over several lines whereas a smile is usually simpler and shorter.

In The Odyssey, an epic simile is used in order to describe the joy Penelope feels after being reunited with her husband, Odysseus, after being separated from him for twenty years. The first few lines of the epic simile - describing the joy as being as “warm as the joy that shipwrecked sailors feel/when they catch sight of land.” - taken on their own could be just a mere simile; however, Homer’s further

elaboration on the comparison, the vehicle, which describes the object of comparison, the tenor, is what pushes the simile into the epic.
The scenario that Homer paints for the reader in the epic simile is a familiar one to the audience (and, one would think, intimately familiar to Odysseus.) It details a shipwreck caused by the wrath of Poseidon in which countless of the sailors’ comrades die before they are able to make it to solid land. The joy enters the scenario when “they plant their feet on solid ground again,/spared a deadly fate.” In this eight line epic simile, Homer takes the audience on the condensed, emotional journey of The Odyssey. While the narrative of The Odyssey was primarily focused on the journey itself with the emotions Odysseus feels interspersed throughout, this epic simile instead uses the journey to express a strong emotion - joy. The use of the journey and the violent imagery lends physical form to an abstract emotion and through its use; Homer is able to fully convey the sheer intensity of the emotional scene of reunion.
What is particularly interesting about this epic simile in the context of The Odyssey as a whole is exactly to whom the emotions are being ascribed - Penelope.

The structure of the passage containing the simile leads the audience to think that the simile is referring to Odysseus. The lines immediately preceding the epic simile - “he wept as he held the wife/he loved, the soul of loyalty, in his arms at last.” - take place from Odysseus’s point of view. The comparison used is a simplified version of Odysseus’s journey and the joy of returning “home” to dry land so it would be reasonable for the audience to assume that the joy being described belongs to Odysseus, who had finally returned to his home. However, the lines immediately following the epic simile reveal that the joy being described belongs to Penelope herself about her reunion with Odysseus. This causes the scenario used to describe the joy - the shipwreck - to take on a new meaning. By using a simplified of Odysseus’s journey (sans monsters and goddesses) to describe Penelope, Homer transfers Odysseus’s emotions and struggles to Penelope. The not only emphasizes and clarifies the emotional intensity of the scene, but it also highlights Penelope’s and Odysseus’s close relationship and their similarities. Like Odysseus and like the sailors in the epic simile, Penelope was also trying to reclaim “home” by fending off her rowdy and inconsiderate suitors and trying to maintain order in Ithaca while her husband was

missing.
The epic simile, like metaphors and simile, functions to give abstract ideas concrete form. They lend, in the case of Penelope and Odysseus, recognizable action to unfamiliar emotion. In other cases of epic simile in The Odyssey, they use familiar, yet equally dynamic, images to describe unrecognizable actions. The epic simile also appeals to multiple senses – sight, sound, smells, touch, hearing, and kinesthetic – in a way that is almost cinematic, providing a visceral punch to already dramatically and emotionally tense scenes. But while epic simile was meant to familiarize the unfamiliar, Homer did not tell the story of The Odyssey for audiences thousands of years into the future. While the epic similes in The Odyssey retain their cinematic quality and their energy, much of the intended impact is lost to the modern day reader who finds the vehicle of the simile just as alien as the tenor.