Courage In The Odyssey

BANG, CLASH, BOOM, screams of terror and triumph that is the sounds of battle, or the sound of a journey. The hobbit, the Odyssey, Courage by Anne Sexton, even the Ugly Duckling. They all have one thing in common, they go on journeys that change them for the better or for worse. When you read all of them you see their fears and their hardships and what would make many people turn back at the sight of these trials of challenge. In these works of literature, like The Odyssey we see Odysseus go through many trails that killed many of his men like the Cyclops or Scylla and Charybdis. These trails are very extreme version, unlike in The Ugly Duckling which is a more subtle examples of courage like when he flies away from the farm and continuously

More fearsome it is now than when the cyclops penned us in his cave?What power he had! Did I not keep my nerve, and use my wits to find a way out for us? Now I say by hook or crook this peril too shall be something that we remember.¨ (Odysseus lines 767-773)

Odysseus said this because he want his men to gain the bravery that he has gained from his journey through all his trails that he now want his men to see that they have gained the same. But, in a journey you don't need to learn how to fight, but how to survive and endure plenty of pain not physically but, mentally. In this story,The Ugly Duckling, by Hans Christian Anderson, a Young duckling is shunned out of his family and his community because he is not like the rest of the ducks in the community. The duckling runs away and goes through many trials like the harsh winter, and him being constantly judged by many animals. But finally, after his harsh treatment after the winter he flies out and sees some swan and he thinks to himself,

¨They will kill, because I am so ugly, and dare to approach them; but it does not matter: better to be killed by them than pecked by the ducks, beaten by the hens, pushed about by the maiden who feeds the poultry, or starved with hunger in the winter.¨(The Ugly Duckling lines

In the poem Courage, by Anne Sexton, we read the story of a young man whose life is full of hardships, and the most interesting hardships is about his time as a soldier, ¨ Later, if you faced the death of bombs and bullets you did not do it with a banner, you did it with only a hat to cover your heart.¨(lines 13-17) The statement shows that this man or women cannot be distraught with the danger of war, and shall never be afraid of what it is to come next in their lifetime such as this,¨Later, if you have endured a great despair, then you did it alone, getting a transfusion from the fire, picking the scabs off your heart, then wringing it out like a sock.¨ (lines 26-31) In this thought, the author explains the end of a hardship of losing someone and accepting