Deception and Dreams in Homer's Odyssey

 by Brett Rutherford

The narrative structure of The Odyssey permits Odysseus himself to narrate the central part of the epic in the first person. Where the epic begins, and ends, with an impersonal omniscient voice (Homer’s) capable of divining the thoughts and actions of gods and men, a key part of the story — Books IX through XII — is told by the hero himself in his own words.

Through this device, the epic’s hero becomes the Bard, narrating his own story. He gains in narrative power, because he speaks as a man to his fellow mortals, but he loses the ability, in these adventures, to speak for the gods or to narrate distant events.

This part of The Odyssey contains the most extreme demands on our suspension of disbelief: the encounter with Polyphemus and the Kyklops, the horrific meeting with Scylla and Charybdis, the descent into the underworld, and the stay on the island of the dreaded witch/goddess Kirke.

This raises the possibility that this part of the narrative consists of ‘“whoppers,’“ tall-tales told by Odysseus to entertain his hosts. If this is so, these more supernatural episodes are susceptible to interpretation outside the narrative of The Odyssey. Are they dreams, myths, and wishes? Are they outright deceit on the part of Odysseus to explain away the’ loss of his ship and crew and obtain the largesse of a rich host?

There is clear evidence, in the text itself, that Odysseus was out to best the court poet Demodokos. His listeners had accepted the Kyklops and Kirke stories, and perhaps they were stories they had heard before, and were amused to hear as first-hand reports. But when Odysseus, in Book XI, goes where no man has gone before and returned, the Underworld, and begins to catalog all the famous women of antiquity, whom he recognizes without even having a spirit guide, his hosts cut him off with these lines:

The king said: “As to that, one word, Odysseus: from all we see, we take you for no swindler -- though the dark earth be patient for so many, scattered everywhere, baiting their traps with lies of old times and places no one knows.

“You speak with art, but your intent is honest. The Argive troubles, mid your own troubles, you told as a poet would, a man who knows the world.” (Odyssey xiii:421-427)

This is a polite warning from the king that Odysseus has gone too far. His tale is too extravagant and has gone beyond the remotely possible, precisely because Odysseus slipped into an omniscient narration in his catalog of women. The king then urges Odysseus to return to things he knows, specifically what the dead Greeks in Troy might have told him.

In the passages that follow, Odysseus interviews the shades of Agamemnon (who describes his murder by Klytemnestra), Achilles (who learns some details about the fall of Troy from Odysseus), and Ajax. Then, Odysseus goes wild again, and sees mythical figures including Tityos, Tantalos, Sisyphus, and Heracles.

If Odysseus is the clever pathological liar he seems to be, he uses his interviews with the dead Greeks to establish two things: (1) he actually went to the underworld because there is no other way he, adrift all these years, could know about Agamemnon’s  murder, and (2) he was really at Troy, because he can instruct the shade of Achilles on what happened after the great hero’s death.

Even though the hell journey ends with more inconceivable descriptions, the heart of the narrative re-establishes the credibility of Odysseus. The king falls for it.

Let us consider in more detail the setting in which Odysseus launches upon his first-person narrative. As guest of King Alkinoos and the Phaiakians, Odysseus, at dinner, listens attentively as their own bard, Demodokos, relates three stories — one of an early argument between Odysseus and Achilles; one about the illicit love affair between Aphrodite and Ares; and finally, the tale of the fall of Troy, with Odysseus’ own role in it.

Odysseus is keenly aware that his hosts have a child-like craving for tales involving gods and men, so he is tempted to relate his own misfortunes in the most expansive way. Under the spell of wine and an appreciative audience, and inspired by his host’s bard, did Odysseus exaggerate, fantasize, or even lie?

The episodes narrated in the first person by Odysseus are the only portions of the book that involve supernatural characters other than familiar Greek gods. Calypso, a goddess, is all but human; the travails of Penelope and Telemachus are those of a real wife and a real son. The action, like that of The Iliad, is an intertwined narrative of humanistic gods and heroic men and women. All of these events can be taken as credible to audiences in Homer’s time, even if the actions of the gods are taken either as symbolic or as a literary device.

But can we believe that even the Greeks of Homer’s time still believed in one-eyed Kyklops, multi-tentacled Scylla, or the witch Kirke transforming men into pigs? And can the descent into Hades to consult with Tiresias be anything more than a dream? These events from Odysseus’ first-person narrative beg to be taken as a ‘“poem within a poem,’“ not to be seen as literal narrative, but as symbolic of the hero’s quest for home, hearth, family and life itself.

The story of Polyphemus, the Kyklops, devouring Odysseus’ crew one by one, in ghastly detail, could be a nightmare recollection of the tale of Saturn devouring his children, the Olympians. As the Titans castrated their father Ouranus, Odysseus emasculates and disempowers Polyphemus by penetrating and burning out his single eye. Freudians can have a field day with this one, a Bronze Age cannibal nightmare of human gore.

In an episode that has the dream-like quality of near-repetition, Odysseus and his crew encounter the hideous King Antiphates and his equally hideous queen whose minions repeat the rock-throwing attack of Polyphemus, forcing Odysseus to flee a second time from flying boulders.

In another episode, King Aiolos hosts Odysseus, equips his ship and sends him off for home with a magic wind-bag that can provide unfailing breezes. When Odysseus’s crew breaks into the windbag suspecting it contains treasure, the magic is broken arid Odysseus is driven back to King Aiolos’s court a second time. In a turnabout characteristic of dreams, the hero is rejected with scorn by his former hosts, who now curse him and drive him out. This too is a dream episode circling back upon itself.

Although Scylla and Charybdis are based on an actual whirlpool and a dreaded rock against which sailors were sometimes dashed, the depiction of Scylla as a man-devouring giant squid is hard to miss. The squid, as well as its oceanic framework, is a powerful female symbol, and the squid’s parrot-like beak into which men are pulled and devoured is a symbol of both being eaten and being castrated. The whirlpool Charybdis is an all-­consuming maelstrom that also devours men, dashing them to the sea floor into smithereens. This, too, is a powerful symbol of the female as destroyer. This is the same dread of the Maelstrom. that transfixed Poe and Verne.

Finally we come to the witch/goddess Kirke, whose name means falcon or hawk, on the island of Aeaae (a palindrome name which means “wailing.”) Unlike the irresistible Calypso who is man’s vision of a yielding goddess, Kirke is the Dark Woman, the woman of danger, capable of drugging, emasculating, or even turning men into beasts. The details Homer uses to describe Kirke and her tamed animals are rich in an elder mythos that may predate the Olympians. She feeds her swinish victims acorns and carnelian cherries, the food of the dead in Hades. This suggests that the souls of the transformed men may be in some death-state. Kirke can only be conquered by an anti-potion, and by securing her vow not to harm Odysseus. Once conquered, she is surprisingly compliant — like her near relation Medea, she makes a perfect spouse, once tamed.

The story of Odysseus and Kirke has a strange mirror relationship with the final resolution of the story of Odysseus and his wife Penelope. Kirke may be viewed as the Jungian shadow of Penelope, in a dream-vision that reverses and prefigures everything in the denouement in Ithaka. Kirke’s name means “falcon” and one meaning of Penelope is “striped duck” — a hunting bird, raptor with talons, versus the calm, aquatic, home-and-husband-loving duck. Both Kirke and Penelope sit weaving at a loom.

Penelope is surrounded by suitors who are killing off and eating all her kingdom’s livestock. Kirke kills off all the men who visit her island, converts them into livestock and (we presume) eats them, or serves them up to her next victims.

Odysseus rescues his crew from Kirke’s clutches, presumably returning their souls from some kind of limbo or Hades; in Ithaka he will kill the suitors and send their souls to Hades, where they will be sorted out as unworthy souls.

Arriving on Kirke’s island, Odysseus demonstrates his mastery and manhood by killing an antlered deer. This act, described in detail; establishes him as hunter-master with a claim to the domain. When Odysseus returns to Ithaka disguised as a beggar, he must establish his manhood against the suitors, with his prowess and archery.

When Kirke offers herself to Odysseus, he says, “Now, being a man, I could not help consenting.” In this dream episode, she then becomes Penelope’s shadow double: she feeds him, bathes him, lavishes upon him all conceivable feminine attentions. Only the protests of the sailors put an end to this idle delusion.

At home, Odysseus has a stalwart son, Telemachus. In the Kirke sequence, Odysseus has a favored young companion, Eurylokhos, whom he treats as a son and who comports himself bravely, even taking Odysseus to task for seeming too willing to give in to Kirke’s wiles.

A god, Hermes, comes to Odysseus and advises him on how to conquer Kirke; back in Ithaka, Athena provides wise counsel on how to defeat the suitors. Hermes is the god who delivers messages in dream-sendings; hence, he belongs in the Kirke dream. Athena is banished from the Kirke adventure altogether.

Finally, Kirke, a shadow, only releases Odysseus from the dream world in which she had held him captive on the condition that he first make the dread journey to meet the shades from Hades, who come to taste the blood from a ram sacrifice and must speak the truth. In this nightmare vision, Odysseus meets a long succession of historic and mythic  persons. He must plunge into death in order to return to life.

Once the first-person narration ends and Odysseus is returned to Ithaka in Book XIII  — significantly, while sleeping, Homer’s epic returns to gods and men, and there are no more witches or twelve-legged monsters with which to contend. Significantly, the first person he speaks to is Athena in disguise, confirmation that’ he is in the waking world.

It is not unlikely that Odysseus earned from his guests, in exchange for his wild tales, a much needed sleeping potion, and a kind return home. The drugged transport was also a way to help prevent Odysseus from retracing his steps, should he have military ambitions against other city-states. And the blind bard of the court was probably glad to see him go, too, not desiring any local competition.

The search for dream imagery in The Odyssey can also center on bird symbols.  Kirke is a falcon. Penelope is a duck. Athena’s symbol is an owl; and Hermes, an Egyptian deity at heart, is represented by the ibis bird. The weapon of choice in The Odyssey is the arrow — arrows are bird-like, fletched with the feathers of birds.

In all the captivities depicted in the epic, it is bird-freedom which is denied Odysseus. Wingless monsters and witches are all rooted to their places: Calypso cannot leave her island; Kirke stays in her magical palace; the Kyklops and Antiphates are earth- bound troglodytes who can only hurl giant rocks. Scylla, Carybdis and the Sirens, too, are tied to their locales cannot leave them, patient as spiders in their webs. The dead mill about in Hades, going nowhere. Only Odysseus and his hapless sailors, and Telemachus and his traveling companions, possess the means, or will, to move from place to place. As if to reinforce the idea of being rooted to one place, Poseidon punishes the Phaiakians for transporting Odysseus by petrifying their ship (xiii:200) so that “We make an end, henceforth of taking, in our ships castaways who may land upon Shkeria.: (xiii:225)

Seeing the center of The Odyssey as a tall tale in no way diminishes Homer’s art, and permits us to examine how the classic workings of dreams can form a microcosm of myth within a larger work of art. The entire Kirke-Odysseus episode, in terms of structure alone, shows a wonderful mirror symmetry in Homer’s art. As Penelope becomes her  shadow Kirke, reality infuses dream, in epic as in life.

— Providence, RI
March 2005 /
Pittsburgh, PA
August 2026

Quotations from the Fitzgerald translation. 

Dialogue (Harmodius and Anacreon)

by Brett Rutherford

1

Harmodius, to Anakreon:

Unread, your latest scroll

its seal unbroken, too.

At noon, I send my servant hag

to hurl your scroll,

wrapped up with this one,

over your garden wall.

How passers-by will laugh

to see a withered crone

asking the neighbors

which gate belongs to you.

They’ll say Anakreon

now plunders graves

as well as cradles.

Shamed now perhaps,

you will stop those ardent letters.

Don’t put my name in your poems.

Don’t ask me to read them.

Don’t pay to have them sung

at your next banqueting.

You’re nothing but trouble for me.

You could be my uncle,

my father, even —

so no more loving glances, ever!

2

Anakreon to Harmodius:

Cupid’s bent arrows cannot return.

Cruel one, our secret is out.

My passion is over

before its egg could hatch.

I did not name you, or confess it.

“Which one,” they asked, “would Zeus,

or the fool-poet Anakreon, love best!”

You huffed about, and blushed, and preened

so much that all my readers put

two and two together and linked our names.

You did not mind my admiration

you did not mind my poems, even.

Now that your brass-faced vanity

refuses me and scorns my gifts,

I am not bound by modesty.

Henceforth I wear the badge of love

not in the heart-held lining

but on the sleeve for all to see.

Let people judge who is the baser fool:

I, the unloved lover, or you,

the worthless object of a great Desire!

— Revised 2026. 

Burnt Offering

 

by Brett Rutherford

Anacreon, to Harmodius:

About that letter, the fervent one,

the one you hinted you’d sell

unless I enriched your coffers —

you mocked its shaky autograph,

and threatened a scandal —

I know your threat is false.

Last night in my sleep I saw

your hands on a crumpled scroll,

the thrust toward a sputtering lamp,

the tiny screams as my words,

my awesome and unrepeatable vows,

my praise of your unworthy beauty,

collapsed and withered in a blue-green flame.

You brushed the ashes from your gentle arms —

they scattered, mingled with dust motes,

rode a moonbeam in a moment’s leap

toward ghosthood, then dissipated.

Only one moth, before its suicide,

dipped in the ash and shared

one final taste of my missive.

No Phoenix rose, the earth

did not open to swallow you,

and your disdainful triumph

did not diminish the cosmos.

Yet he who burns love-letters

offends the Gods.

You dare undo my holy madness

with your little hecatomb

of paraffin and oil?

They will come back to sting you,

my salamander syllables.

Try and love anyone now! Your sunken cheeks

and pale complexion will drive all away.

All will know you are pursued and haunted.

You will wish you had kept the living scroll

when you see how Love, an ash-faced Fury,

comes back from Acheron,

a broom-hag to drive

your other suitors off,

nightmare’s bedmate, engendering

alarming sores and bruises,

leaving you spent and exhausted

as though a nest of incubi

used you to train their young.

You gloated first, I had composed

a shameful letter, and I would pay.

But when you learned

my missives wind up

in the best anthologies,

you gloated again

to burn it.

In vain,

your destruction of evidence.

You see,

I always keep a copy.

— Revised 2026.

The Conference

by Brett Rutherford

Atop a mountain hunting lodge,
amid boar-heads
and many-antlered deer,
in a sunny eagle-eyrie
with barrels of wine and beer,
the best of the best have assembled.

As always, the group of nondescript
officials lean in
upon a pile of folders and documents.
Each has composed a part
of the whole, without divining what
the leader really had in mind —

Him, the one at the table’s head.
The unapproachable one
whose decisions are always right
without or without their labors!

At the great man’s right, one says,
to open the topic at hand:
They are not like us, you see.
They are primitive. The one
on the great man’s left intones:
No manner of education can fix them.

One by one, they chime on in.
Who knows that gods they really worship?
Their women breed like rabbits.
Times past, in these very forests,
we hunted Gypsies for sport —
     so why not these ones?
Has even one of them composed
a symphony or written a novel —
not without fraud, I assure you!

The world will be glad
     when we are rid of them.

One near the head of the table
opens his binder and indicates
the page to which they all must turn.

We can do this, he says,
The Americans have shown us the way.
Their Indians are almost gone,
and will soon be exterminated.

They get down to strategies
and tactics. A fund
has already been allotted.
Troops here. And here.
The border sealed.
Boxcars and trucks
are at the ready.

At the table’s far end
the moustache rises,
then falls — a smile!

2
Sometimes the room
is in a palace,
sometimes a sunny eyrie
atop a mountain hunting lodge,
sometimes a high-tech bunker
a-blink with lights and monitors.

Always, the same kind of men
hunch over their binders.
They have lists.
As went the Indians,
Armenians, and Jews,
Romana and homosexuals,
now go the rest of them.

They do not look one another
eye-to-eye. For each has a list,
and the other is on it.

Note: This poem was suggested by the Wahnsee Conference. On January 20, 1942, Nazi Party and German government officials gathered at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, where the details were unveiled for the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” I have moved the location to a hunting lodge.

 

Into the Ashen Night

 

by Brett Rutherford

I know we said we’d never —

but for a moment today

we passed a foot apart

on the angry pavement,

sun in your eyes,

the snow in mine.

The edges of our shadows touched,

an overlap of gray penumbras.

Late slant of sun upon my desk,

the lamp turned on, beam-glance

from the glass framed portrait

I have not brought myself

to hide away or burn —

too many shadows! I want to write.

My shadow dips down to page

with its own pen.

I hesitate.

It gets there first,

mocks my writing

with almost invisible ink,

my fountain-pen aslant

with most peculiar penmanship

in a nearly-forgotten tongue:

Ne sors pas dans la nuit cendrée,

sous l'ombre de la lune —

évite ce lieu hanté

où un fantôme ressuscité

chante pour lui-même!

Dans son sang-froid,

la rouille rouge

et une corrosion noire

coulent.

Son œil cyclopéen

aspire tout sur lui-même,

son iris

un abîme d'onyx...

Oh, the horrors that the heart withholds!

* * *

Translation:

O go not forth into the ashen night,

beneath the shadow of the moon —

avoid that haunted place

where a risen ghost sings to itself!

In its cold blood, red rust

and black corruption flow.

Its Cyclopean eye

draws all into itself,

its iris an abyss of onyx...

— Revised 2026. Originally titled, “Contact.”

Who Can Be A Poet All of the Time? (2026 revision)

by Brett Rutherford

Who can be a poet all the time?

The sons of rich fathers,

remittance men —

spinster heiresses with hyacinth hair,

filling long sheets with

delicate verse —

the wrinkled don retired at last

to his monument of sonnets —

the very young — the truly mad —

the Muse-possessed

(not just visited, inhabited

by the poem-urge) —

But for the rest of us,

being a poet

is at best an illusion,

at worst a vice.

A thing of glory, certainly.

Honor or profit?

not in this age!

Against those professionals,

we migrant poets must distill

into a hundred poems,

the brandy of their thousands,

lift up our frail mimosa leaves

beneath their sky-

consuming oaks.

Vast tomes they fill,

prose interrupted

by spasms of the ENTER key,

or blocks of text

that seem the stuff of Bedlam.

They are at it, day and night.

The mail truck groans

with their outgoing manuscripts.

They teach this stuff.

Honest to God, they are paid to do it!

They sniff at one

another’s résumés.

Their blurbs adorn

one other’s jackets.

They are weighted down with medals.

If you sleep with one,

you can be a contest-winner!

Young rivals beware:

they trample their peers,

for something called “tenure.”

The rest of us

must steal these hours,

scrawl debtors’ ink

on dime-store paper,

consort with the Muse

as though adulterous,

secret as those frenzies

in the alleys of Sodom

between the angels

and the damned.

In the anvil world we live in

we are impractical, slothful,

lounging for adjectives

when we should be “working,”

shouting our newfound lines

against the surf,

to the dead in graveyards,

to the indifferent grackles

on our window ledge —

absolutely useless, this

rootless, anti-

Puritan-ethic obsession —

Except that for these moments,

freely given,

we would nothing trade,

knowing that those who follow us

would forfeit fortunes, too,

for such a poetic seizure,

would trade a life of ease

for a mouthful of words,

the words that come as though

a thunder-god had uttered them.

—Revised 2026

Dead Poets

by Brett Rutherford

Thirteen thousand lady poets,

Poe said,

gave all their verse away —

no wonder he starved!

Too many poets,

that’s the problem!

too many living

poets,

not enough glory fodder

to feed us!

What’s a poet to do?

Become a Dead Poet!

It’s a guaranteed path

to glory, fame and im-

mortality!

There’s the Memorial Reading.

Your friends will come.

Writers who barely knew you

pen verse in your honor.

Then, finally, you appear

in the best anthologies —

something about closed brackets

around your years

seems to appeal to editors.

Critics discover you

(they never feed on anything living)

repeat your words

and have their way with your meaning —

no one cries rape

when words are ravished.

It matters little that your neighbors

have forgotten you —

already the next tenant

shops for oven cleaner,

new tools in the garage.

Oblivious traffic hums on the bridge

you leapt from.

It does not count

that everyone you slept with

is bedding down

with the worst surviving haiku-ists,

that even your best beloved

has put your books in the cellar —

what’s temporal fame

when someone can write

a doctoral thesis

on your use of caesura,

your bittersweet alliteration?

So do it quick —

perish and publish!

When the last petal

on the only wreath

that graced your grave

is borne away

on a winter wind,

your time will come!

— Revised 2026

The Old Gravestones

Pioneer cemetery in Edinboro, PA

 

by Brett Rutherford

Names last, dates fade, deeds disappear.

Try if you will to read these stones —

earth clots around inscriptions,

moss rubs like moist eraser.

Even in best light you cannot read

their rhymes of what heavens they earned

or paid that others should think so.

Stonemason’s script rubs down to worm-lines,

elegant esses and effs are mere wrinkles.

Would anyone know if the stones were swapped,

if pious spinster’s stone became confused

with an outcast wench’s marker,

if brides and grooms and stillborn babes

exchanged their names and families,

half-breed with minister,

hermit with midwife?

What a terrible stew at Resurrection

if these stones were needed,

carried like credit cards

to the last communion!

Even the wind, and wind-borne waters,

shorn of the lake and incontinent clouds

work bald forgetfulness in granite,

sandstone erased, slate shorn by frost and thaw.

Easy to read BORN.

Born is everywhere.

Born as we all are,

but when is gradually erased.

Zeros and eights and nines

curve into shallow depressions,

sevens and ones to cuneiform,

thin lines and gashes.

Easy to read DIED

but isn’t that obvious?

Death dates and Aetat ages

wink out in wind-rub.

A few are blank,

carved and waiting

for sleepers who never came.

(Fought in a war —

no body was found —

went to the city —

ran for a freight train —

or just plain never died?)

Names. The names linger.

Eye leaps from letter to letter,

fills in the biblical

and well-known names.

The sculpted angels are armless now,

the stones once faced

with weeping-willow carvings

are horizontal.

Some have been propped back up

on broken pediments

with bolts and metal braces.

Do they toss in their sleep?

Do stones fly up

like lumpy pillows,

tilt down

to shade unhappy eyes?

I too would turn

if line by line

and page by page

the universe erased me!

—Revised 2026