Imagery from the Iliad

One of the things I like about poetry is its ability to use imagery from the natural world to convey a thought, an emotion, a situation, etc. There’s a passage in the Iliad where a truce between the two armies dissolves, and war breaks out. The author uses meteorological imagery to describe the clash between the two. Lines 517 through 523 (the first eight lines here) tell the 'literal' account of the conflict, while the following lines employ beautiful imagery.

It's pretty neat.

At last the armies clashed at one strategic point,
they slammed their shields together, pike scraped pike,
with the grappling strength of fighters armed in bronze
and their round shields pounded, boss on welded boss,
and the sound of struggle roared and rocked the earth.
Screams of men and cries of triumph breaking in one breath,
fighters killing, fighters killed, and the ground streamed blood.
Wildly as two winter torrents raging down from the mountains,
swirling into a valley, hurl their great waters together,
flash floods from the wellsprings plunging down in a gorge
and miles away in the hills a shepherd hears the thunder—
so from the grinding armies broke the cries and clash of war.

Iliad Book IV, Lines 517 – 527*