Concepts of Sea and Ocean as key symbols in the original works of Alexander Blok and Algernon Charles Swinburne: an Analysis (original) (raw)
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SWINBURNE'S SEA-PROSE AND THE ANTI-NOVEL
2017
LANGUAGE CAN BE MADE TO REVOLT against its own instrumentality. That is the promise Algernon Charles Swinburne pursues in his unfinished novel Lesbia Brandon, composed in 1859–67 but not published until 1952. Early on in this work, we encounter a passage that perfectly showcases his peculiar and innovative prose style. It is a style that boldly invents its own mechanism of self-perpetuation, and, as it ramifies throughout the novel, turns the text into something other than a conventional narrative – a singular grammar of sensuous perception. The novel's young protagonist, Herbert Seyton, has rounded a corner of a coastal road and comes face to face with the sea. Lesbia Brandon is full of descriptions of the natural environment like this one. It is one of many moments in the novel in which characters encounter, experience, and merge with the seascape. These instances concatenate Swinburne's formal project throughout Lesbia Brandon, a project of translating forces that create patterns in the perceived world into models for prose. The resulting stylistic transformation extends not only to the figurative aspects of Swinburne's language but also to its grammatical and syntactic underpinnings, as peripheral, " accessory " elements become core shaping forces in the prose. This process is at work as Herbert rejoices in the sea-coast and all its enchantments: The long reefs that rang with returning waves and flashed with ebbing ripples; the smooth slopes of coloured rock full of small brilliant lakes that fed and saved from sunburning their anchored fleets of flowers, yellower lilies and redder roses of the sea; the sharp and fine sea-mosses, fruitful of grey blossom, fervent with blue and golden bloom, with soft spear-heads and blades brighter than fire; the lovely heavy motion of the stronger rock-rooted weeds, with all their weight afloat in languid water, splendid and supine; the broad bands of metallic light girdling the greyer flats and swaying levels of sea without a wave; all the enormous graces and immeasurable beauties that go with its sacred strength; the sharp delicate air about it, like breath from the nostrils and lips of its especial and gracious god; the hard sand inlaid with dry and luminous brine; the shuddering shades of sudden colour woven by the light with the water for some remote golden mile or two reaching from dusk to dusk under the sun; shot through with faint and fierce lustres that shiver and shift; and over all a fresher and sweeter heaven than is seen inland by any weather; drew his heart back day after day and satisfied it. (196-97; ch. 2)
Toward a Blue Cultural Studies: The Sea, Maritime Culture, and Early Modern English Literature
Literature Compass, 2009
This article explores the cultural meanings of the maritime world in early modern English literature. Placing English literary culture in the context of the massive ocean-bound expansion of European culture that began in the 15th century, it suggests that the sea's ancient meanings shifted in the early modern period as geographic experience and knowledge increased. The article examines some recent developments in maritime studies, sometimes called a 'new thalassology' (from the Greek thalassos, the sea); distinguishes these trends from now-traditional New Historicist and Atlantic studies; and suggests how these methods can contribute to a 'blue cultural studies'. The new maritime humanities speaks to a series of modern discourses, including globalization, postcolonialism, environmentalism, ecocriticism, and the history of science and technology. The article provides two examples of how these maritime discourses can change our interpretations of early modern English literature, first by examining a canonical poem-Milton's 'Lycidas'-and second through reconsidering a historical context, the 'Bermuda pamphlets' on which Shakespeare seems to have drawn in The Tempest. O what an endlesse worke haue I in hand, To count the seas abundant progeny, Whose fruitfull seede farre passeth those in land, And also those which wonne in th'azure sky. The Faerie Queene (4.12.1) The new millennium is bringing humanities scholarship back to the sea. Renewed interest in the oceans informs interdisciplinary programs like HMAP (History of Marine Animal Populations) and Duke University's 'Oceans Connect' initiative. It influences new thinking in the ecological sciences, public policy, and even international law. In the humanities, the leading edge of these discourses emerges out of the thriving and influential discipline of 'Atlantic history', but other types of history have also been turning to the sea, including economic history, imperial history, the history of ideas, the history of science, and historical geography. These discourses seek out the maritime in order to reconsider standard discursive models. Looking closely at the sea, rather than just the land, challenges established habits of thought. This article examines some new developments in maritime studies, including the so-called 'New Thalassology'; distinguishes these trends from now-traditional New Historicist and 'Atlantic' scholarship; and suggests how these new methods can contribute to what I call a 'blue cultural studies'. 1 This new maritime perspective does not view the oceans simply as bodies to be crossed, but as subjects in themselves. Reconsidering the ocean as ocean can open up new analytical frames for scholars of early modern English literature, including a newly dynamic (and disorderly) sense of ecological relationships and a different way of articulating multicultural connections in the early modern global world. After summarizing these trends, I will briefly
'Setting sea-serpents in verse': momentum and meaning in Swinburne's decasyllabic couplets
Cambridge Literary Review, 2012
This paper contends that Swinburne's verse momentum creates meaning by forging connections between disparate ideas present across a poem. The paper presents close readings of two texts in decasyllabic couplets, ‘Anactoria’ and Tristram of Lyonesse. The reading of ‘Anactoria’ defines the relationship between momentum and semantic structure, refuting critics who perceive meaning in Swinburne as fragmentary and diffuse. The essay then takes a broader contextual view of Tristram of Lyonesse to conclude that momentum is a function of narrative as well as verse structure, and creates systems of meaning across the whole text. The conclusion of the essay unpacks the metaphysical implications of the structures of meaning created by momentum. Throughout the essay is concerned with the way in which Swinburne’s momentum involves a subjective understanding of time, and with the theme of final metaphysical unity.
Maritime Modernism: The Aqueous Form of Virginia Woolf's The Waves
Despite the rise of eco-critical approaches to Woolf's writing and a thriving debate as to whether her 1931 novel perpetuates or challenges colonialist axiomatics, The Waves has not inspired an extended, focused investigation of its articulation of aqueous nature and the latter's reshaping under imperial maritime power. This essay examines how a critique of maritime modernity emerges from The Waves' modernist orchestration of the seas. I contend that the work sets a conventional representation of the waters as facilitators of national and imperial progress against a counter-articulation that formally challenges it. The novel thus allows us to place it in the context of inscriptions of the seas by techno-sciences and international law during high imperialism and re-organizations of the seas as the empire contracts. Viewed in relation to the maritime recoding of the planet's hydrosphere, and the perceptual modes, narratives, and ethos of mastery it engenders, The Waves elucidates an alternative vision to a life-world made uneven by this recoding. Concentrating on waters, I conclude, allows us to glean a textured view of an understudied but persistent feature in Woolf's fiction.
Archetypal Symbols in the Symphonic Poem The Sea by Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis
Musicologica Brunensia 55 (1), 2020
We find many symbolic legacies in the creative and musical work of Lithuanian music composer and painter Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875-1911). He processed cosmological, religious , national Lithuanian and natural motifs. The symphonic poem titled Jūra (The Sea) from 1907 is saturated with archetypal symbols of the natural elements with a philosophical overlap. The study focuses on the analysis and interpretation of selected musical symbols in the structure of the work. The initially onomatopoeia effects of the composition get new significance and contexts during archetypal performance. The archetypal symbols of the composition refer to the patterns of the life cycle on the background of the ambivalent water element. The study has the objective to newly interpret the symphonic poem Jūra in the context of archetypal symbolism.
2014
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