Calypso

They reached out for the good things that lay at hand and when they’d had their fill of
food and drink the lustrous one took up a new approach. “So then, royal son of
Laertes, Odysseus, man of exploits, still eager to leave at once and hurry back to your
own home, your beloved native land? Good luck to you, even so. Farewell! But if you
only knew, down deep, what pains are fated to fill your cup before you reach that
shore,

you’d stay right here, preside in our house with me and be immortal. Much as you long
to see your wife, the one you pine for all your days … and yet I just might claim to be
nothing less than she, neither in face nor figure. Hardly right, is it, for mortal woman to
rival immortal goddess? How, in build? in beauty?” “Ah great goddess,” worldly
Odysseus answered, “don’t be angry with me, please. All that you say is true, how well
I know. Look at my wise Penelope. She falls far short of you, your beauty, stature. She
is mortal after all and you, you never age or die … Nevertheless I long—I pine, all my
days— to travel home and see the dawn of my return. And if a god will wreck me yet
again on the wine-dark sea, I can bear that too, with a spirit tempered to endure.
Much have I suffered, labored long and hard by now in the waves and wars. Add this to
the total— bring the trial on!” Even as he spoke the sun set and the darkness swept
the earth. And now, withdrawing into the cavern’s deep recesses, long in each other’s
arms they lost themselves in love.

When young Dawn with her rose-red fingers shone once more Odysseus quickly
dressed himself in cloak and shirt while the nymph slipped on a loose, glistening robe,
filmy, a joy to the eye, and round her waist she ran a brocaded golden belt and over
her head a scarf to shield her brow, then turned to plan the great man’s voyage home.
She gave him a heavy bronze ax that fit his grip, both blades well-honed, with a fine
olive haft lashed firm to its head. She gave him a polished smoothing-adze as well and
then she led the way to the island’s outer edge where trees grew tall, alders, black
poplars and firs that shot sky-high,

seasoned, drying for years, ideal for easy floating. Once she’d shown her guest where
the tall timber stood, Calypso the lustrous goddess headed home again. He set to
cutting trunks—the work was done in no time. Twenty in all he felled, he trimmed
them clean with his ax and split them deftly, trued them straight to the line.
Meanwhile the radiant goddess brought him drills— he bored through all his planks
and wedged them snugly, knocking them home together, locked with pegs and bolts.
Broad in the beam and bottom flat as a merchantman when a master shipwright turns
out her hull, so broad the craft Odysseus made himself. Working away at speed he put
up half-decks pinned to close-set ribs and a sweep of gunwales rounded off the sides.
He fashioned the mast next and sank its yard in deep and added a steering-oar to hold
her right on course, then he fenced her stem to stern with twigs and wicker, bulwark
against the sea-surge, floored with heaps of brush. And lustrous Calypso came again,
now with bolts of cloth to make the sail, and he finished that off too, expertly. Braces,
sheets and brails—he rigged all fast on board, then eased her down with levers into
the sunlit sea.

That was the fourth day and all his work was done. On the fifth, the lovely goddess
launched him from her island, once she had bathed and decked him out in fragrant
clothes. And Calypso stowed two skins aboard—dark wine in one, the larger one held
water—added a sack of rations, filled with her choicest meats to build his strength,
and summoned a wind to bear him onward, fair and warm. The wind lifting his spirits
high, royal Odysseus spread sail—gripping the tiller, seated astern— and now the
master mariner steered his craft, sleep never closing his eyes, forever scanning the
stars, the Pleiades and the Plowman late to set and the Great Bear that mankind also
calls the Wagon: she wheels on her axis always fixed, watching the Hunter,

and she alone is denied a plunge in the Ocean’s baths. Hers were the stars the lustrous
goddess told him to keep hard to port as he cut across the sea. And seventeen days he
sailed, making headway well; on the eighteenth, shadowy mountains slowly loomed …
the Phaeacians’ island reaching toward him now, over the misty breakers, rising like a
shield.

But now Poseidon, god of the earthquake, saw him— just returning home from his
Ethiopian friends, from miles away on the Solymi mountain-range he spied Odysseus
sailing down the sea and it made his fury boil even more. He shook his head and
rumbled to himself, “Outrageous! Look how the gods have changed their minds about
Odysseus—while I was off with my Ethiopians. Just look at him there, nearing
Phaeacia’s shores where he’s fated to escape his noose of pain that’s held him until
now. Still my hopes ride high— I’ll give that man his swamping fill of trouble!”

With that he rammed the clouds together—both hands clutching his trident—churned
the waves into chaos, whipping all the gales from every quarter, shrouding over in
thunderheads the earth and sea at once—and night swept down from the sky— East
and South Winds clashed and the raging West and North, sprung from the heavens,
roiled heaving breakers up— and Odysseus’ knees quaked, his spirit too; numb with
fear he spoke to his own great heart: “Wretched man—what becomes of me now, at
last?