Epic Similes as Nectar Among Thorns

“A poem of any length neither can be, nor ought to be, all poetry.”  ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Litteraria

“ ‘Why did the whole Greek world exult over the combat scenes in the Iliad?’ asks Friedrich
Nietzsche. We modern readers do not even begin to understand them ‘in a sufficiently
“Greek” manner’. If we understood them in Greek, ‘we should shudder’. Nietzsche does not
mean in the Greek language but in the Greek spirit. Whoever reads the Iliad … has to come
to terms with the profound ‘otherness’ of one of the very traditions which lie at the root of
ours.” ~ Michael Schmidt, The First Poets, 17

Addiction wins inside through Homer’s lines,

No, not the whole of them.  Addiction comes

When he abandons guts and then confines

Himself to beauty that in beauty thrums,

Away from slaughter.  Homer turns to lengths

Of loveliness set out together, stretched

Together in a pause from war, strengths

Of loveliness in nature, each part etched

In words immortal separated, set

Apart from sword-sliced bellies and apart

From manliness, its javelins and threat

Of lances shoved like raping through ribs’ heart.

  As gold-striped bees spread out to search for flowers,

    Stretched epic similes seek out sweet powers.

~ Phillip Whidden