On poetic interpretation of nature

by John Campbell Shairp

So many a fire between the ships and stream

Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy.

A thousand on the plain; and close by each

Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire;

And champing golden grain the horses stood

Hard by their chariots waiting for the dawn.”

These few samples of the similes scattered thick throughout the Iliad show that Homer laid all the appearances of Nature under contribution, and the wildest and grandest not less than those that are home-like.

True it is that Homer in the Iliad nowhere stops to paint scenery for its own sake. He does this less than Virgil or most later epic poets. He is so full of business and of human action that he cannot stay for description. But in such passages as the Catalogue of the Grecian Host in the second book, there are brief but fine touches of geographical landscape, as he tells of the many lands whence they came; or again in his fixed but most suggestive epithets of places, as “the windy Ilion,” “many-fountained Ida,” and the deep-whirlpooled Scamander; Lacedæmon in the hollow of the hills; Messe, haunt of wild doves; vine-clad Epidaurus; windy Enerpe; Orchomenus rich in flocks.

I would that I could linger over this subject and quote some more passages, such as that where Achilles, long absent, returns to the conflict, and the immortal gods come down to range themselves, some with the Greeks, some on the side of Troy; and heaven and earth, the mountains and the rivers and the sea and the nether world beneath, all are moved to take part in the great issue.

But I must pass on to the scenery of the Odyssey. No doubt this poem contains much more description of landscape than the Iliad, and in that description, as Mr. Ruskin says, there seems to be a preference for the tame and domestic rather than for the wild in Nature. But is there not enough in the subject and circumstance of the two poems to account for such difference? Ulysses, the much-traveled, much-suffering man, who had endured so many things by land and sea, his home-sick heart is yearning for his native Ithaca. That his heart should be weary of the sea and the mountains and all wild untractable things is only too natural. It is quite in keeping with and as a set-off against this feeling of home-weariness that the poet, in describing such a wanderer, should dwell with peculiar emphasis on all that is warm and comfortable and home-like in scenery.