almost strikes the ship. The line of
danger is not yet passed.

Still Ulysses must tell something else though his frightened companions
try to dissuade him. But he must, he cannot help it: "If any one ask
thee, say it was Ulysses, the city-destroyer, who put out thine eye." A
great light this word brings to the poor blind Cyclops, almost the
light of self-consciousness. He recalls, he knows his conqueror, and
therein begins to know himself, to recognize his error. "Ah, woe is me!
the ancient oracles about me are fulfilled!" Of old there had been
prophecies concerning his destiny, but he did not understand them,
seemingly did not regard them. How could he, with his bent toward the
godless? The prophet Telemus had foretold "that I would lose my sight
at the hands of Ulysses." How shall we consider this prophecy? A dim,
far-off presentiment among the Cyclops themselves that they were to be
subjected to a higher influence; their limited, one-eyed vision was to
vanish through a more universal, two-eyed vision. Such a presentiment
nature everywhere shows, a presentiment of the power beyond her, of the
spiritual. What else indeed is Gravitation? A longing, a seeking which
even the clod manifests in its fall earthward, a prophetic intimation;
so the Cyclops, the natural man, had his prophet whom he now begins
rightly to recognize; truly he is getting religious, quite different is
his present utterance from his previous blasphemy: "we are better than
the Gods." Nay, he offers to intercede with his father Neptune, praying
the God to give a sending of the stranger over the sea. Moreover he
recognizes his divine father as the only one who can heal him in his
present distress. Possibly the words are spoken to beguile, but
Polyphemus here offers to do his duty to the stranger on his shores,
and he recognizes the Gods.

Manifestly we witness in this passage a striking development of the
rude Cyclops under the tough discipline of experience. He acknowledges
first his mistake in regard to the prophecy: "I expected to see a man
tall and beautiful and of vast strength, not this petty worthless
weakling who has put out mine eye." A hero of visible might, a giant
like himself, not a man of invisible intelligence, he imagined he was
to meet; great was his mistake. The conflict between Brain and Brawn
was settled long ago before Troy, and has been sung of in the preceding
Book. Here then is certainly a confession of his mistake, and, if his