Homeric Simile

“Straight forward they sprinted, lifted it, and rammed it deep in his crater eye, and leaned on it turning it as a shipwright turns a drill in the planking”

Twisting a drill is being compared to how they turned the knife in their eye

“In a smithy one sees a white-hot ahead or an adz plunged and wrung in a cold tub, screeching steam—the way they make soft iron hale and hard: just so that eyeball hissed around the spike”

A black smith plunging hot iron into iron is being compared to when they put the hot spike into the eye

“But the man skilled in all ways of contending, satisfied by the great bow’s look and heft, like a musical, like a harper, when with quiet hand upon his instrument he draws between his thumb and forefinger a sweet new string upon a peg: so effortlessly Odysseus in one motion string the bow”

Odysseus stringing his bow is being compared to a musician/harper

“His dear wife, clear and faithful, in his arms, longed for as the sun warmed earth is longed for by a swimmer spent in rough water where his ship went down under Poseidon’s blows, gale winds and tons of sea. Few men can keep alive through a big surf to crawl, clotted with brine, on kindly beaches in joy, in joy knowing the abyss behind”

Him returning to his wife is being compared to a summer struggling and finally reaching land

“Think of a catch that fishermen hack un to half-moon bay in a fine-meshed net from the white caps of the sea: How all are poured out of the sand, in throes for the salt sea, twitching their cold lives away in Helios’ fiery air: So lay the suitors heaped on one another”

Fish piled upon eachother is being compared to suitors piled upon each other