Odyssey 5.50 · Book 5, lines 50–54
Over the waves like a gull
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Πιερίην δʼ ἐπιβὰς ἐξ αἰθέρος ἔμπεσε πόντῳ· σεύατʼ ἔπειτʼ ἐπὶ κῦμα λάρῳ ὄρνιθι ἐοικώς, ὅς τε κατὰ δεινοὺς κόλπους ἁλὸς ἀτρυγέτοιο ἰχθῦς ἀγρώσσων πυκινὰ πτερὰ δεύεται ἅλμῃ· τῷ ἴκελος πολέεσσιν ὀχήσατο κύμασιν Ἑρμῆς.
Setting foot on Pieria, he swooped from the upper air down onto the sea; then he sped over the waves like a gull, a bird which, down the dread troughs of the barren sea, hunting fish, wets its thick wings in the brine — like it Hermes rode the many waves.
Word by word
The setting
Hermes flies to Ogygia. He alights on Pieria (in northern Greece), drops from the sky to the sea, and skims the water — compared to a gull hunting fish over the open deep and wetting its wings in the spray.
A note on this passage
The flight itself. Hermes touches down on Pieria, then drops from the bright sky to the sea and skims the water like a gull — and the gull gets its own small scene: a bird working the deep troughs of the open sea, hunting fish, soaking its wings in spray. Then the poem snaps back: like that, Hermes rode the waves.
The simile does what Homeric similes always do — it reaches out of the divine world into the ordinary one, a real seabird on a real ocean, and lets us feel the god's motion through it. But it also quietly seeds the element of this whole book. Before Odysseus even appears, the poem fills with sea: barren, dread-troughed, endless. The wing that a bird only dips, the man will nearly drown in.
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