One class I teach — though I’m fortunate to teach two sections of this course — has begun one of my favorite pieces of literature, the Odyssey. Highly figurative language with a tendency toward oddly inverted sentences, it’s a struggle for them at first, though. We take the time during the first reading to pick apart the opening lines to see how Homer works.

The first famous lines include it all (in this particular translation). There’s inverted sentences like this: “But not by will nor valor could he save them.” We work through the sentence, determining the subject, the verb, and the object, writing it out in normal order: “He could not save them by will or valor.” Numbering the words, students realize just how inverted the sentence is.

“Lord Helios […] took from their eyes the dawn of their return” the stanza ends, and while many of us might find that easily enough understood, the average eighth grader doesn’t have a lot of experience with figurative language.

As we work, there’s a bit moaning, a bit of boredom, especially among the boys. Who wants to put this much effort into reading, and a poem at that? That’s alright. I know that when the blood starts flowing — Cyclops starts crunching bones and Scylla begins picking off men — they’ll all come around.