Japanese pearl diver

Japanese woman pearl diver, in 1968. The image accompanies a 2005 news item on Discovery.com about a tankless breathing system for divers. 

Pauline Pavlona

Ah! then you know! I thought to tell you first.
Not here, beneath these hundred curious eyes,
In all this glare of light; but in some place
Where I could throw me at your feet and weep.
In what shape came the story to your ear?
Decked in the teller’s colors, I’ll be sworn;
The truth, but in the livery of a lie,
And so must wrong me. Only this is true:
The Tsar, because I risked my wretched life
To shield a life as wretched as my own,
Bestows upon me, as supreme reward -
O irony – the hand of this poor girl.
“Here, I have the pearl of pearls for you,
Such as was never plucked from out of the deep
By Indian diver, for a Sultan’s crown.
Your joy’s decreed,” and stabs me with a smile.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich, ‘Pauline Pavlona’ (1891), extract.

‘Pauline Pavlona’ is a one-act drama set in contemporary St Petersburg, included in Aldrich’s collection The Sister’s Tragedy, with Other Poems, Lyrical and Dramatic (1891). The words are spoken to Pauline by Count Sergius Pavlovich Panshine.

The Drowned Mariner

Alone in the dark, alone on the wave,
To buffet the storm alone,
To struggle aghast at thy watery grave,
To struggle and feel there is none to save,—
God shield thee, helpless one!
The stout limbs yield, for their strength is past,
The trembling hands on the deep are cast,
The white brow gleams a moment more,
Then slowly sinks—the struggle is o’er.

Down, down where the storm is hushed to sleep,
Where the sea its dirge shall swell,
Where the amber drops for thee shall weep,
And the rose-lipped shell her music keep,
There thou shalt slumber well.
The gem and the pearl lie heaped at thy side,
They fell from the neck of the beautiful bride,
From the strong man’s hand, from the maiden’s brow,
As they slowly sunk to the wave below.

A peopled home is the ocean bed;
The mother and child are there;
The fervent youth and the hoary head,
The maid, with her floating locks outspread,
The babe with its silken hair;
As the water moveth they lightly sway,
And the tranquil lights on their features play;
And there is each cherished and beautiful form,
Away from decay, and away from the storm.

Elizabeth Oakes Smith, ‘The Drowned Mariner’ (1846) , last three verses

Amoret and the River-God

God. What powerful charms my streams do bring
Back again unto their spring,
With such force, that I their god,
Three times striking with my rod,
Could not keep them in their ranks?
My fishes shoot into the banks;
There’s not one that stays and feeds,
All have hid them in the weeds.
Here’s a mortal almost dead,
Faln into my river-head,
Hallowed so with many a spell,
That till now none ever fell.
‘Tis a female young and clear,
Cast in by some ravisher:
See upon her breast a wound,
On which there is no plaster bound.
Yet she’s warm, her pulses beat,
‘Tis a sign of life and heat. -
If thou be’st a virgin pure,
I can give a present cure:
Take a drop into thy wound,
From my watery locks, more round
That orient pearl, and far more pure
Than unchaste flesh may endure. -
See, she pants, and from her flesh
The warm blood gusheth out afresh.
She is an unpolluted maid;
I must have this bleeding staid.
From my banks I pluck this flower
With holy hand, whose virtuous power
Is at once to heal and draw. -
The blood returns. I never saw
A fairer mortal. Now doth break
Her deadly slumber. Virgin, speak.

Amoret. Who hath restored my sense, given me new breath,
And brought me back out of the arms of death?

God. I have healed thy wounds.

Amoret. Aye me!

God. Fear not him that succoured thee.
I am this fountain’s god. Below
My waters to a river grow,
And ‘twixt two banks with osiers set,
That only prosper in the wet,
Through the meadows do they glide,
Wheeling still on every side,
Sometimes winding round about,
To find the evenest channel out.
And if thou wilt go with me,
Leaving mortal company,
In the cool streams shalt thou lie,
Free from harm as well as I:
I will give thee for thy food
No fish that useth in the mud;
But trout and pike, that love to swim
Where the gravel from the brim
Through the pure streams may be seen:
Orient pearl for for a queen
Will I give, thy love to win,
And a shell to keep them in …

John Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess (1609-10).

The Faithful Shepherdess is a pastoral tragi-comedy set in Thessaly. The shepherdess is Clorin. Among the several characters involved involved in the play’s romantic complications is Amoret, loved by Thenot, who in turn loves Clorin, but who is loved by Amarillis. The God of the River also features.

Comus

There is a gentle Nymph not far from hence,
That with moist curb sways the smooth Severn stream,
Sabrina is her name, a Virgin pure,
Whilom she was the daughter of Locrine,
That had the Scepter from his father Brute.
That guiltless damsel flying the mad pursuit
Of her enraged stepdam Guendolen,
Commenced her fair innocence to the flood
That stay’d her flight with his cross-flowing course,
The water Nymphs that in the bottom plaid,
Held up their pearled wrists and took her in …

SONG

Sabrina fair,
Listen where thou art sitting
Under the glassie, cool, translucent wave,
In twisted braids of lillies knitting
The loose train of they amber-dropping hair,
Listen for dear honour’s sake,
Goddess of the silver lake,
Listen and save …

… Rise, rise, and heave thy rosie head
From thy coral-pav’n bed,
And bridle in thy headlong wave,
Till thou our summons answered have.
Listen and save.

By the rushy-fringed bank
Where grows the Willow and the Osier dank,
My sliding Chariot stayes,
Thick set with Agat, and the azum sheen
Of Turkis blew, and Emrauld green
That in the channell strayes,
Whilst from off the waters fleet
Thus I set my printless feet
O’er the Cowslips Velvet head,
That bends not as I tread,
Gentle swain at thy request
I am here.

John Milton, Comus (1637), extracts.

In Milton’s masque, Sabrina is the nymph of the River Severn.

In a Copy of Omar Khayyam

These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred,
Each softly lucent as a rounded moon;
The diver Omar plucked them from their bed,
Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread.

Fit rosary for a queen, in shape and hue,
When Contemplation tells her pensive beads
Of mortal thoughts, forever old and new.
Fit for a queen? Why, surely then for you!

The moral? Where Doubt’s eddies toss and twirl
Faith’s slender shallop till her footing reel,
Plunge: if you find not peace beneath the whirl,
Groping, you may like Omar grasp a pearl.

James Russell Lowell, ‘In a Copy of Omar Khayyam’ (1888).

The poem refers to Edward Fitzgerald’s creative translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859), originally written by the Persian poet in the 11th century.

Bathing in the Windrush

Their lifted arms disturb the pearl
And hazel stream
And move like swanbeams through the yielding
Pool above the water’s whirl
As water swirls and falls through the torn field.

Earth bares its bodies as a burden:
Arms on a bright
Surface are from their shadows parted,
Not as the stream transforms these children
But as time divides the echo from the start.

Similing above the water’s brim
The day-light creatures
Trail their moonshine limbs below;
That melt and waver as they swim
And yet are treasures more possessed than shadows.

This wonder is only submarine:
Drawn to the light
Marble is stone and moons are eyes.
These are like symbols, where half-seen
The meaning swims, and drawn to the surface, dies.

Anne Ridler, ‘Bathing in the Windrush’ (1949)

Seashore

Behold the Sea,
The opaline, the plentiful and strong,
Yet beautiful as is the rose in June,
Fresh as the trickling rainbow of July;
Sea full of food, the nourisher of kinds,
Purger of earth, and medicine of men;
Creating a sweet climate by my breath,
Washing out harms and griefs from memory,
And, in my mathematic ebb and flow,
Giving a hint of that which changes not.

Rich are the sea-gods: – who gives gifts but they?
They grope the sea for pearls, but more than pearls:
They pluck Force thence, and give it to the wise.
For every wave is wealth to Dædalus,
Wealth to the cunning artist who can work
This matchless strength. Where shall he find, O waves!
A load your Atlas shoulders cannot lift?

Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Seashore’ (1847), second and third verses

On Sanazar’s Being Honoured with Six Hundred Duckets by the Clarissimi of Venice, for Composing an Eligiack Hexastick of the City. A Satyer

There is a creature, (if I may so call
That unto which they do all prostrate fall)
Term’d mistress, when they’r angry; but, pleas’d high,
It is a princesse, saint, divinity.
To this they sacrifice the whole days light,
Then lye with their devotion all night;
For this you are to dive to the abysse,
And rob for pearl the closet of some fish.

Richard Lovelace, ‘On Sanazar’s Being Honoured with Six Hundred Duckets by the Clarissimi of Venice, for Composing an Eligiack Hexastick of the City. A Satyer’ (165?), extract