Mark Vernon
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Odyssey’s homecoming, the Cave of the Nymphs, Raine and Blake

30 July 2026. From the archive of Mark's older writing; new posts are on Substack.

‘Tis a much challenged reading, but Kathleen Raine interpreted William Blake’s “The Sea of Space and Time” as depicting the seemingly marginal, but perhaps pivotal, detail in Homer’s “Odyssey” of the Cave of the Nymphs on the beach of Ithaca where Odysseus is left by the Phaeacians, which Porphyry interpreted as a Neoplatonic key to his spiritual homecoming, or nostos.