in meet life, and accordingly they
set sail upon the sea, bound for home and country. But such men have
not in them the elements of the Return. Storms arise, winds blow, the
helmsman is killed by the falling mast, and the ship is struck by
lightning. The destructive powers of nature seem to concentrate upon
these destroyers; such is the decree of Zeus, carrying out his promise
to the Sun; verily the Supreme God could not well do otherwise. Ulysses
alone barely saves himself upon a fragment of the mast and keel;
manifestly there is a difference between him and his companions, who
disobeyed his order. The text says that "the companions feasted for six
days," it would seem that he did not; still he is involved in their
calamity, though not fully in their guilt. Here is, then, a distinction
of importance, since upon it is based the saving of Ulysses, who is yet
to have a career.

While Ulysses may not have personally participated in the guilty deed,
he was not active against it, he did not apparently seem to restrain
the repetitions of it, he was paralyzed in energy. It was his will
which was defective, not his intellect; he did not commit the offense,
but he did not stop it, and try to conciliate the wrath of the Gods by
sacrifices, by what we now call repentance. Hence, while he does not
perish, he is still unfinished, incomplete, with a limit to be removed.
A training of the Will is to be gone through next, till it be able to
do what Reason commands. A new discipline therefore is in store for the
Hero after the loss of his ship and his companions.

What will this discipline be? To a degree his entire career must be
worked over again from the beginning. Upon his fragment of wood he
floats back to Scylla and Charybdis; he falls into the old dualism in
one of its phases, for he cannot stay upon the Island of the Sun, the
place of unity and rest and light. Indeed have we not just seen him in
the fierce conflict between knowing and doing, which he has not been
able to unify in the last adventure? So he drops back between the
grinding mill-stones of two opposites; one of these opposites, the
maelstrom Charybdis, is sucking him in, but he clutches the branches of
a large fig-tree overhanging the whirlpool, and holds fast till his
mast and keel return to the surface of the water, upon which he
escapes.

One cannot help feeling that the poet in this description has a
conscious meaning underneath, it is more or less allegorical