Odyssey 5.154 · Book 5, lines 154–158
His nights and his days
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ἀλλʼ ἦ τοι νύκτας μὲν ἰαύεσκεν καὶ ἀνάγκῃ ἐν σπέσσι γλαφυροῖσι παρʼ οὐκ ἐθέλων ἐθελούσῃ· ἤματα δʼ ἂμ πέτρῃσι καὶ ἠιόνεσσι καθίζων δάκρυσι καὶ στοναχῇσι καὶ ἄλγεσι θυμὸν ἐρέχθων πόντον ἐπʼ ἀτρύγετον δερκέσκετο δάκρυα λείβων.
But truly by night he would sleep, even under compulsion, in the hollow caves, an unwilling man beside a willing goddess; but by day, sitting on the rocks and the beaches, wracking his heart with tears and groans and pains, he kept gazing over the barren sea, shedding tears.
Word by word
The setting
The narrator fills in the rhythm of Odysseus's captivity on Ogygia: the nights he is made to spend with Calypso in her cave, the days he spends alone on the shore, weeping toward the sea he cannot cross.
A note on this passage
The lines split his captivity into two panels: nights in the cave, days on the shore. The nights are spent with Calypso — but the poem is careful with the verb, ‘even under compulsion,’ and with the terrible little balance οὐκ ἐθέλων ἐθελούσῃ, the unwilling man beside the willing goddess. By day he does nothing but sit and weep at the water.
The undercurrent is in a single word: the sea he stares at is ἀτρύγετος, ‘unharvested, barren.’ It is the standing epithet for the sea, but here it lands exactly — a waste that gives nothing back, mirroring days that go nowhere. And the goddess's name, Calypso, means ‘the concealer’: to lie with her is to be hidden from the world, erased from the story he is desperate to rejoin.
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