Chapter 19: Omission of Connectives

… What is spoken falls out and, as it were, pours itself forth, nearly anticipating the speaker himself. “Locking their shields together,” says Xenophon, “they thrust, fight, kill, die.” And these lines of Eurylochus:

We went up past the hedge as we were directed, Odysseus;
We saw there in glens the abodes that were finely erected.

The lines, you see, chopped apart from each other and—none the worse for it—hurried along, carry a clear suggestion of action and of simultaneously tripping the reader and of hurrying him along in the chase. Such is what the poet has achieved by the lack of connectives.