Odysseus
Seeking to find his home, Odysseus crosses each water;Through Charybdis so dread; ay, and through Scylla's wild yells,Through the alarms of the raging sea, the alarms of the land too,--E'en to the kingdom of hell leads him his wandering course.And at length, as he sleeps, to Ithaca's coast fate conducts him;There he awakes, and, with grief, knows not his fatherland now.
Words in this poem
- charybdis n.
- A dangerous whirlpool on the coast of Sicily opposite Scylla on the Italian coast. It is personified as a female monster. See Scylla.
- fatherland n.
- One's native land; the native land of one's fathers or ancestors. [Imitated fr. D. vaderland. See Father, and Land.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Odysseus is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Poems of Schiller — Third period, Project Gutenberg ebook #6796; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Friedrich Schiller, Odysseus, in The Poems of Schiller: Third Period (1805), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #6796, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/schiller-third-period/odysseus.html, id L21863.
Form and metre
Odysseus is 6 lines in a single stanza. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic tetrameter.
See other poems in iambic tetrameter.
Measured by Laurel's pipeline, not copied from a handbook: how stress and metre are counted, how rhyme is lettered, how a drifted rhyme is found. Where the dictionary cannot confirm a rhyme the letter is withheld, not guessed.
Scansion, line by line
Each line with its syllable count and the stresses the words themselves fix: / stressed, ˘ unstressed, · a syllable the word leaves free and the metre decides. Read against iambic tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Seeking to find his home, Odysseus crosses each water; | 14 | /˘····˘/˘/˘·/˘ |
| Through Charybdis so dread; ay, and through Scylla's wild yells, | 13 | ·˘/˘·····/˘·· |
| Through the alarms of the raging sea, the alarms of the land too,-- | 16 | ··˘/··/˘··˘/···· |
| E'en to the kingdom of hell leads him his wandering course. | 13 | ···/˘·····/˘· |
| And at length, as he sleeps, to Ithaca's coast fate conducts him; | 14 | ·······/˘··˘/· |
| There he awakes, and, with grief, knows not his fatherland now. | 14 | ··˘/······/˘·· |
The reader shows the same poem with its rhymes coloured and a stress row above each line, the notes beside their stanzas, and any word's definition on a tap; the analysis page takes the whole book apart. How every part of this site was made.