WAiR | A College Student's Odyssey

Mock epic · 23 lines, six beats each · August 2026

Homer composed in dactylic hexameter, six galloping beats to the line. English resists the meter, but Longfellow cheated his way through Evangeline and nobody stopped him, so the precedent stands. The poem is on the left. The right column explains which god was responsible for each disaster.

I. The Voyage Out
Sing to me, Muse, of the kid with the bike and the canceled connection,	The invocation. Every epic opens by asking the Muse for help. She is, as usual, unavailable.
Son of the doctor, who rose in the dawn from the dorms of his summer,	The patronymic. Heroes are named by their fathers. The dorms held a summer research program in Providence, Rhode Island.
Pedaling north out of Providence, past the American ruins,	Wednesday, August 6. He set out for Boston by bicycle along a rural rail trail.
Mills of the nineteenth century, silent, their spindles forgotten.	The trail passes the old mills of New England's textile industry. Odysseus sailed past fallen civilizations too. His were younger.
Rail bore him then to the city, and five last miles to the hotel,	Bike on the train to Boston, then five miles of city riding to his father's hotel. This leg went suspiciously well.
There at the table he spoke of his learning, the tongue of the Germans,	The recognition scene. He revealed over dinner that he had been studying German. His father did not know. Homer's heroes are also full of surprises at dinner.
Skilled now in asking a waiter for menus, though not yet for dinner,	His competence covers small, mildly amusing phrases. Requesting the menu is within range. Ordering from it is not.
Thanking the gray-eyed goddess of language, divine Duolingo.	"Gray-eyed" is Athena's epithet, here reassigned. Of all the languages on offer, he chose German. No further explanation was given.
II. The Wrath of Transit Poseidon
Homeward he turned, but the Transit Poseidon was wrathful and watching.	The antagonist. Poseidon spent ten years keeping Odysseus off the water. The MBTA, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, which runs Boston's trains, needed one afternoon.
Bikes are forbidden at rush hour, decreed the Poseidon of Boston;	The commuter rail bars full-size bicycles from 4 to 8 p.m. This is real policy, not poetic invention.
Twice he was cast from the trains, twice driven again from the harbor.	A conductor ejected him from two consecutive trains. The doubled "twice" is a genuine Homeric repetition pattern.
Long he was held in the halls of the Library, splendid Calypso,	Calypso's island. Odysseus was detained seven years by a goddess. Our hero waited out the ban at the Boston Public Library.
Rich in her marble and countless her volumes, yet still he longed homeward.	The McKim building really is splendid, which is the point. Calypso's island was lovely too. Detention is detention.
Dark was the last of the riding, the road into Providence, starless.	He finally boarded after 8 p.m. and biked the last stretch home to Providence in the dark.
III. The Wandering, Compressed
Dawn, with her fingers of rose, brought word that the flight was no longer.	Rosy-fingered Dawn is Homer's most famous formula. Here she delivers a Southwest cancellation notice.
Southwest, the cloud-hoarding god, had canceled and offered no reason.	Zeus is the "cloud-gathering" god. Airlines, like gods, owe mortals no explanations.
Far off his parents made offerings, clicking on fares in the ether.	His mother and father scrambled for replacement tickets from Maryland. Minor deities, intervening ineffectively from a distance.
Then he embarked on the gray ship of Amtrak, the hollow-benched vessel;	"Hollow ships" is a real Homeric formula for the Greek fleet. Amtrak departed Providence at 4 p.m.
Slow was the voyage, delayed and harassed by the weather, and halting.	Repeated stops and weather pushed the trip hours past its scheduled arrival. The gods do not publish revised timetables.
Sweet then the Sirens of Baltimore sang, and he came to their station,	The Sirens. Their song lured sailors off course. Baltimore Penn Station is not BWI, a distinction the Sirens obscured.
Down from the train at the wrong stop he stepped, for their singing was lovely.	He disembarked one station early. Odysseus at least had the excuse of being tied to a mast.
IV. Nostos
Out through the dark drove his parents to fetch him, as parents have always.	The drive to Baltimore was longer than the planned drive to BWI. This is how minor deities atone.
One in the morning he crossed his own threshold, the wanderer, home now,	Nostos, the homecoming, the goal of the whole poem. He walked in at 1 a.m., nine hours after departing Providence.
Twenty years old as of midnight, for August the eighth was his birthday.	The delays carried him past midnight into his own 20th birthday. The homecoming and the birthday celebration were the same event.
Nine were the hours of his wandering. Odysseus needed a decade.	The final scorecard. The hero of this poem is, on the evidence, the more efficient traveler.

Sources & Notes

The meter: Dactylic hexameter, six feet per line, is the meter of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, and Ovid's Metamorphoses. The English stress-based adaptation follows Longfellow's Evangeline.

The epithets: "Gray-eyed" (Athena), "rosy-fingered" (Dawn), "cloud-gathering" (Zeus), and "hollow ships" are genuine Homeric formulas.

"Complicated": Emily Wilson's translation of polytropos, Homer's first epithet for Odysseus. The Odyssey, W. W. Norton, 2017.

The MBTA: The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority prohibits full-size bicycles on commuter rail during weekday peak hours.