In Cold Blood

Since childhood, for more than half his thirty-one years, he had been sending off for literature (‘FORTUNES IN DIVING! Train at Home in Your Spare Time. Make Big Money Fast in Skin and Lung Diving. FREE BOOKLETS …’), answering advertisements (‘SUNKEN TREASURE! Fifty genuine maps! Amazing Offer …’) that stoked a longing to realise an adventure his imagination swiftly and over and over enabled him to experience: the dream of drifting downwards through strange waters, of plunging towards a green sea-dusk, sliding past the scaly, savage-eyed protectors of a ship’s hulk that loomed ahead, a Spanish galleon – a drowned cargo of diamonds and pearls, heaping caskets of gold.

Truman Capote, In Cold Blood (1966).

The passage refers to one of the fantasies of Perry Smith, who with Dick Hickock, murdered the four members of the Clutter family of Kansas in 1959, which became the subject of Capote’s ‘documentary fiction’.

Gebir

But I have sinuous shells of pearly hue
Within, and they that lustre have imbibed
In the sun’s palace-porch, where when unyoked
His chariot-wheel stands midway in the wave:
Shake one, and it awakens; then apply
Its polisht lips to your attentive ear,
And it remembers its august abodes,
And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there.

Walter Savage Landor, ‘Gebir’ (1798), Book One.

‘Gebir’ is an epic poem in seven books, about an Iberian prince who invades Egypt but who is conquered by love, treachery and magic. The words here are spoken by a sea-nymph.

She rose to His Requirement – dropt

She rose to His Requirement – dropt
The Playthings of Her Life
To take the honorable Work
Of Woman, and of Wife -

If ought She missed in Her new Day,
Of Amplitude, or Awe -
Or first prospective – Or the Gold
In using, wear away,

It lay unmentioned – as the Sea
Develop Pearl, and Weed,
But only to Himself – be known
The Fathoms they abide -

Emily Dickinson, ‘She Rose to His Requirement – dropt’ (c.1863)

The Tempest

Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of his that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:

Burden. Ding-dong
Hark! now I hear them – ding-dong, bell.

William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1611), Act I, Scene ii.

Sung by Ariel (while invisible) to Prince Ferdinand.

All for Love

Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow;
He who would search for pearls must dive below.

John Dryden, All for Love (1678), prologue.

All for Love; or, The World Well Lost, is a blank verse drama on the tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra, written by Dryden in imitation of Shakespeare’s play. The Prologue is a plea to the playwright’s critics to look kindly on his work and to appreciate it for its hidden riches.

Jubilate Agno

Let Hushim rejoice with the King’s Fisher, who is of royal beauty, tho’ plebian size.

For in my nature I quested for beauty, but God, God hath sent me to sea for pearls.

Let Machir rejoice with Convolvulus, from him to the ring of Saturn, which is the girth of Job; to the signet of God – from Job and his daughters BLESSED BE JESUS.

For there is a blessing from the STONE of JESUS which is founded upon hell to the precious jewel on the right hand of God.

Christopher Smart, ‘Jubilate Agno’ (1758-1763), fragment B.

Christopher Smart wrote ‘Jubilate Agno’ over a period of four years (1758/9-1763), while incarcerated in a lunatic asylum. It was not published until 1939, and not in its correct order until 1954. It follows the antiphonal pattern of classical Hebrew poetry, with Let verses answered by For verses. The work is a hymn of praise, with erudite and allusive references to literary, philosophical, Biblical and personal themes. The verses here are B30 and B31. ‘Hushim’ means one of the sons of Dan (Genesis 46:23). ‘Machir’ was the son of the patriarch Massaneh (Joshua 17:1). According to Karina Williamson and Marcus Walsh, “B31, written on 7 August, the Feast of the Name of Jesus, prompts one of Smart’s most complicated exercises in allusion (the choice of ‘Convolvulus’ is not fortuitous). The linking idea is that of divine blessing, symbolized by ‘girth’ (i.e. girdle or cincture, hence the association with ‘ring’), as in the proverb ‘ungirt, unblessed’. Smart’s specific reference is to God’s exhortation in Job 38:3 (’gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee’), but the girdle is a common biblical symbol for righteousness and faithfulness. The girdle/ring association leads on to the ’signet’, which is a symbol of God’s blessing in Jeremiah 22:24. The ‘Stone’ refers both to the biblical designation of Jesus as the corner-stone of the true faith, and to the patristic identification of him as the ‘pearl of great price’ (Matthew 13:46).” (Christopher Smart: Selected Poems, Penguin Books, 1990).