National Poetry Month #5 - Full Fathom Five
It's Day 5 of National Poetry Month! And you know what that means -
Full Fathom Five
William Shakespeare
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them,
- ding-dong, bell.
The above song is from Shakespeare's The Tempest, where it is sung by the nymph Ariel to the prince Ferdinand as he grieves over his father, who he believes to be dead.
HOW DO I EVEN BEGIN TO TALK ABOUT HOW AWESOME THIS SONG IS.
There are lots of people who don't think so - see Samuel Johnson, who believed the songs 'express nothing great, nor reveal anything above mortal discovery.' Well, Samuel can go stick his johnson where the sun don't shine, because he is totally dismissing how Shakespeare deliberately foregrounds music over meaning in his songs: we are first of all struck by the beauty of the sound, of that lovely alliterating 'f', which obscures the dark and problematic nature of the lyrics and lures us in. Happily, William Hazlitt has disagreed with Johnson, writing that the power of 'Full Fathom Five' lies in how its music, without conveying 'distinct images', recalls 'all the feelings connected with them, like snatches of half-forgotten music heard at intervals'. Thank you, Hazlitt!
Let's take a closer look at the lyrics of this song. Most famous, of course, is the eyes-to-pearl transformation. Now a pearl is a beautiful thing, yes? But a pearl is also the consequence of an infection, of grit getting into an oyster's flesh and inflaming it, forcing the oyster to secrete nacre to form a hardened shell around the piece of grit. A pearl is a symptom of disease. Now, if you are lying underwater with your eyes petrifying into pearls, you're pretty screwed. Of course, Ferdinand's father Alonso isn't really dead - but there is some figurative truth to Ariel's lie. Twelve years ago, Alonso backstabbed Prospero and his baby daughter Miranda and left them to die on a raft adrift at sea. This wrong has been festering in Alonso's mind ever since - it is embedded in his soul, like grit in an oyster - and the 'pearls' that were his eyes bespeak his moral blindness. He needs that 'sea-change' - that grief he experiences over Ferdinand's death - to regain his moral sight, and stop having pearls in his head, damnit.
I could go on and on about this song - about how Shakespeare has deliberately messed up the order of tense and pluralities, so that 'those are pearls' come before 'that were his eyes', when chronologically they happened in the reverse order - but the basic point is this: this song is the key to the Tempest. The whole play is a pearl. It's what happens when you get an island, and then you get a foreign object that invades the island (Prospero), and then language and music harden around this object to form this absolutely beautiful yet also really problematic drama. And there's transmutation, and flux, and our own experience as audience gets transformed into 'something rich and strange'. It's incredible. I love this song. I'm going to stop now.
I'll just leave you with this cover of 'Full Fathom Five' by my favourite Celtic singer, Méav Ní Mhaolchatha. Gods, I miss Shakespeare so bad.
Full Fathom Five
William Shakespeare
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them,
- ding-dong, bell.
The above song is from Shakespeare's The Tempest, where it is sung by the nymph Ariel to the prince Ferdinand as he grieves over his father, who he believes to be dead.
HOW DO I EVEN BEGIN TO TALK ABOUT HOW AWESOME THIS SONG IS.
There are lots of people who don't think so - see Samuel Johnson, who believed the songs 'express nothing great, nor reveal anything above mortal discovery.' Well, Samuel can go stick his johnson where the sun don't shine, because he is totally dismissing how Shakespeare deliberately foregrounds music over meaning in his songs: we are first of all struck by the beauty of the sound, of that lovely alliterating 'f', which obscures the dark and problematic nature of the lyrics and lures us in. Happily, William Hazlitt has disagreed with Johnson, writing that the power of 'Full Fathom Five' lies in how its music, without conveying 'distinct images', recalls 'all the feelings connected with them, like snatches of half-forgotten music heard at intervals'. Thank you, Hazlitt!
Let's take a closer look at the lyrics of this song. Most famous, of course, is the eyes-to-pearl transformation. Now a pearl is a beautiful thing, yes? But a pearl is also the consequence of an infection, of grit getting into an oyster's flesh and inflaming it, forcing the oyster to secrete nacre to form a hardened shell around the piece of grit. A pearl is a symptom of disease. Now, if you are lying underwater with your eyes petrifying into pearls, you're pretty screwed. Of course, Ferdinand's father Alonso isn't really dead - but there is some figurative truth to Ariel's lie. Twelve years ago, Alonso backstabbed Prospero and his baby daughter Miranda and left them to die on a raft adrift at sea. This wrong has been festering in Alonso's mind ever since - it is embedded in his soul, like grit in an oyster - and the 'pearls' that were his eyes bespeak his moral blindness. He needs that 'sea-change' - that grief he experiences over Ferdinand's death - to regain his moral sight, and stop having pearls in his head, damnit.
I could go on and on about this song - about how Shakespeare has deliberately messed up the order of tense and pluralities, so that 'those are pearls' come before 'that were his eyes', when chronologically they happened in the reverse order - but the basic point is this: this song is the key to the Tempest. The whole play is a pearl. It's what happens when you get an island, and then you get a foreign object that invades the island (Prospero), and then language and music harden around this object to form this absolutely beautiful yet also really problematic drama. And there's transmutation, and flux, and our own experience as audience gets transformed into 'something rich and strange'. It's incredible. I love this song. I'm going to stop now.
I'll just leave you with this cover of 'Full Fathom Five' by my favourite Celtic singer, Méav Ní Mhaolchatha. Gods, I miss Shakespeare so bad.