Odyssey 5.408 · Book 5, lines 408–410
'Zeus let me see it — and there is no way out'
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Odysseus — ὤ μοι, ἐπεὶ δὴ γαῖαν ἀελπέα δῶκεν ἰδέσθαι Ζεύς, καὶ δὴ τόδε λαῖτμα διατμήξας ἐπέρησα, ἔκβασις οὔ πῃ φαίνεθʼ ἁλὸς πολιοῖο θύραζε·
Ah me — since now Zeus has granted me to look on land unhoped-for, and this gulf I have cleft and crossed, yet no way out shows anywhere of the grey sea to safety:
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The setting
Odysseus speaks to his own heart. This is his first speech in the poem: the hero, at his lowest, reasoning aloud on the water.
A note on this passage
Odysseus's speech opens by weighing the gift against the trap. Zeus, he grants, has let him see land he had stopped hoping for, and he has cut his own way across the whole gulf of sea. And yet, at the end of all that effort, there is no visible place to climb out of the grey water.
The bitterness is in the sequence: the god's favour is named first, only to be undercut by 'and yet.' To reach the shore and find it offers no exit is a crueller thing than never reaching it. The word he chooses for the way out, ἔκβασις, is exactly the thing the catalogued coast has just denied him.
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