Odyssey 1.55 · Book 1, lines 55–58
The soft words that make him forget
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τοῦ θυγάτηρ δύστηνον ὀδυρόμενον κατερύκει, αἰεὶ δὲ μαλακοῖσι καὶ αἱμυλίοισι λόγοισιν θέλγει, ὅπως Ἰθάκης ἐπιλήσεται· αὐτὰρ Ὀδυσσεύς, ἱέμενος καὶ καπνὸν ἀποθρῴσκοντα νοῆσαι
His daughter holds back the wretched, grieving man, and ever with soft and wheedling words she charms him, so that he'll forget Ithaca. But Odysseus, longing even to catch sight of the smoke leaping up—
Word by word
The setting
Athena details Calypso's captivity: she detains the grieving Odysseus and charms him with coaxing speech to make him forget his home. The sentence runs on past the line, enjambing into the next unit — ‘but Odysseus, longing to see the smoke of his own land…’
A note on this passage
Calypso's hold on Odysseus is described exactly: she keeps the wretched, weeping man, and works on him constantly with soft, coaxing words to make him forget Ithaca. Against all of it, he wants one small thing — just to see the smoke rising from his own land.
The word for what she does is θέλγει, the verb of spells — what Circe and the Sirens do, magic worked on the mind. Her captivity is enchantment, not chains, and its aim is the real danger of the whole poem: forgetting. Every trap Odysseus meets (the Lotus, Circe's pigsty, the Sirens' song) is a version of sweet oblivion, the loss of the will to go home. What holds out against the spell is the smallest possible image of home — not the palace, not Penelope, just the smoke of a hearth seen from far off.
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