Again the Indian epic supplies a parallel: ‘Like a tired swimmer in water when
he reaches the land, Yuyudha ̄na became comforted on obtaining the sight of
Dhananjaya (Arjuna)’.^80
In my two remaining examples a simile in Sappho finds a parallel in the
north-west. In a song about a friend who has married a Lydian and left her
circle, Sappho says (fr. 96. 6–9), ‘and now she shines among the women of
Lydia, as after sunset the rose-fingered moon, surpassing all the stars’. In an
Irish narrative we read: ‘such was that warrior that, as the moon in her great
fifteenth surpasses the stars of heaven, that warrior, in his form and shape,
surpassed the sons of kings and chieftains of this world.’^81
In a wedding song Sappho anticipates that the girls participating in the all-
night celebration will ‘see less sleep than the melodious bird’, that is, than the
nightingale, which had the reputation of never sleeping. In an Eddic poem
King Frodi sets two doughty slave-women to work at a magic mill that grinds
out whatever the grinder wants. He demands that they work non-stop, saying
‘You’ll sleep no longer than the cuckoo above the hall’. Snorri writes that the
watchman of the gods, Heimdallr, ‘needs less sleep than a bird’.^82 What we
have in these passages is not, I imagine, a traditional poetic simile, but an
ancient popular saying based on the observation that some birds seem to
insist on singing when all good folk are in bed.
FIGURESIf I have not placed similes under this heading, it is because I am reserving
the term ‘figure’ for the arrangement of words in specific patterns. Some such
patternings, like anaphora and epanalepsis, can be found in non-Indo-
European poetries. Others appear to be distinctively Indo-European. To some
extent they were facilitated by features of the language such as inflection,
flexible word order, and the principles of nominal composition.
Polar expressions (‘merisms’)Especially characteristic is the use of polar expressions, that is, pairings of
contrasted terms, as an emphatic expression of the totality that they make
(^80) Od. 23. 233–9; MBh. 7. 116. 12.
(^81) Acallam na Senórach 3733–6 Stokes, trs. Dooley–Roe (1999), 113.
(^82) Sappho fr. 30. 7–9; Grottaso ̨ngr 7. 3–4; Gylf. 27, cf. Lorenz (1984), 374.
- Phrase and Figure 99