Literary Analysis: Divine Anger and Epic Storm in the Aeneid

Whose feeling is the weather

You have already learned to ask a good question of a verse passage rather than hunting for techniques to name. Here is the question this passage wants, and it is not the same one. Your set text is a storm, and in epic a storm is almost never weather. It is somebody’s feeling, made visible and given something to destroy. Juno has not forgiven the Trojans; a storm follows; the fleet is nearly lost. So the thing to notice is not that the description is vivid, which any competent poet could manage, but that the violence in the water is an emotion belonging to a character who is not in the water. Once you are asking whose feeling a passage is enacting, you have something to say about every line of it: about how the sea is described, about the order events are told in, and about what the poet wants an audience to feel while it happens. That is analysis. Naming a simile is not.

Nothing here is your set text

Read this before you go on. This module contains no Latin at all, and that is deliberate rather than an oversight. Your paper is closed-book, which means the words of your prescribed passage are something you are learning by heart, and meeting an approximation of them here would be actively harmful: an approximation is what you would remember. Your printed edition is the only place you should meet the text. What this module gives you instead is the question to ask and the vocabulary to answer it, so that when you sit down with the real lines you already know what you are looking for. That is also why everything below describes effects rather than quoting them. When an example is needed, it describes the shape of a moment rather than reproducing one, and you should lay each idea over your own edition as you go. If you find yourself unable to test a point against the actual text, that is the point at which to stop reading and open the book.

Words for the effect

Five terms for talking about what a passage does rather than what it contains. The last two are the ones that turn a description into an argument.

Match the effect to how it is made

The goddess who touches nothing

Juno wants the Trojan fleet destroyed, and by the end of the passage it has nearly been. What does it tell us about her that she does not do it herself?

• That her power works through persuading others, so the storm is her anger carried out at two removes
• That she is not powerful enough to affect the fleet at all
• That she is reluctant to cause harm directly
• Nothing: it is simply how storms are described in poetry

Which two show indirect power

Select the TWO statements that describe how Juno’s power works in this passage.

• She achieves what she wants by persuading somebody who controls the winds
• The damage to the fleet is done by the winds rather than by her
• She destroys the ships with her own hands
• The storm happens by chance and she merely approves of it

Why a storm and not a battle

It is worth asking why the poet chose this kind of disaster, because the choice does work that a fight could not. Compare what each would let him show.

The shape of the passage

The cause of the storm is Juno’s enduring _____ towards the Trojans. She does not act directly: she works on _____, who is king of the _____, and it is these that strike the fleet as it sails from Sicily toward _____. The result is the near-destruction of the ships. Because the reader is told the cause before the sailors can know it, the passage produces _____ rather than suspense: we watch people suffer something they cannot understand.

The note that only names a device

Four sentences from an answer about the storm. Select the ONE that names a feature without saying what it achieves.

• The sea is described as acting on the ships, which makes the danger feel deliberate rather than accidental.
• There is a lot of vivid description in this passage.
• Because we are told the cause first, we understand the sailors’ danger better than they do, which produces pathos.
• Juno acts through Aeolus, which shows her power working by persuasion rather than force.

Order the analysis of a storm

Put the steps into the order that turns a description into an analysis.

• Ask what the passage is making you feel, before naming anything
• Find the choice the poet made that produces it
• Say what that choice is, using the right term if you have one
• Explain how it produces the effect, in your own words
• Connect it to whose feeling the storm is enacting
• Point to the place in your own edition where it happens

A storm read as character

Here is the method in a paragraph, written without quoting so that you can lay it over your own edition. The storm in this passage is not weather but the visible form of a goddess’s anger, and the poet keeps that connection in front of the reader by giving the cause before the effect. We are told of Juno’s enduring hostility, then shown the fleet in danger, so we understand what is happening to the Trojans better than they possibly could, and the result is pathos rather than suspense: there is no question of what will happen, only of watching it happen to people who cannot see why. The choice of a storm rather than an enemy sharpens this. Against attackers the Trojans could fight, and the passage would be about courage; against weather they can only endure, and the passage is about helplessness before forces that are not interested in them. Juno herself never touches the fleet. Her anger reaches it through Aeolus and then through the winds, so that the most powerful figure in the passage is also the most absent from it, which suggests a power that works by persuading others rather than by acting. Notice what that paragraph does. It starts from an effect, identifies choices that produce it, uses a term only where a term is useful, and returns each point to whose feeling the storm is. And it quotes nothing, because the text is in your edition and not on this page.

Applying it to your own edition

You are working through your prescribed lines with the text in front of you. Take the decisions in order.

• You notice a striking description of the sea. What is the first question to ask?
• You want to write about the sailors. What produces the strongest point?
• You want to bring Juno in. What is worth saying?
• You have named a device and stopped. What must you add?

Explain how the storm works

Using your own printed edition of the prescribed lines, explain how the storm is made to work as more than weather, and what it shows about Juno.

• Explain why a storm in epic is not simply weather
• Say whose feeling this storm enacts, and how the poem makes that clear
• Explain why telling the reader the cause first changes the effect on us
• Explain why the men can only endure, and what that produces that a battle would not
• Explain the chain by which Juno’s anger reaches the ships
• Say what her never touching the fleet suggests about her power
• Choose one moment in your own edition and say what it achieves, not just what it is
• Finish by connecting that moment back to whose feeling the storm is