RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR. Philip Hoare

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СКАЧАТЬ the sea ever since he’d read of ‘sea-shouldering whales’ in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene – ‘What an image that is!’; his poetry habit had made him ‘a Leviathan … all in a Tremble’, and in a letter to his friend Leigh Hunt, he evoked ‘a Whale’s back in the Sea of Prose’. But as he walked along the port’s medieval walls and looked down the grey waterway, the young poet did not see what Horace Walpole had seen a generation before, ‘the Southampton sea, deep blue, glistening with vessels’, nor even any of the dolphins which sometimes swam up it. Instead he found muddy shores laid bare at low tide; the sea had run out. ‘The Southampton water when I saw it just now was no better than a low water Water which did no more than answer my expectations,’ he told his brothers, ‘– it will have mended its Manners by 3.’ Keats’s nerves were raw, so he took out his Shakespeare and quoted from The Tempest for solace: ‘There’s my comfort.’ That afternoon he left on the rising tide, sailing to the Isle of Wight where, troubled by the island’s strange noises and unable to sleep, he began his long poem, Endymion, filled with moonbeams and snorting whales and leaping dolphins and the tale of Glaucus, the fisherman-turned-god with fins for limbs, whom Endymion frees from Circe the witch.

      Keats’s contemporary J.M.W.Turner was also stirred by the restless sea. His imagination stained southern skies: he sketched this shore and painted storms off the Isle of Wight, and when he claimed to have had himself lashed to a ship’s mast in a blizzard so that he could create a great swirling vortex of waves and cloud – as if he were seeing into the future – he gave the vessel’s name as Ariel. And in this stormy story, Shakespeare and Turner would in turn influence another writer. Herman Melville’s eyes had been damaged by scarlet fever in his childhood and rendered as ‘tender as young sparrows’; he was thirty years old, with a career at sea behind him, when he read Shakespeare, discovering a large-print edition of the playwright’s works in 1849. As he began to write about his great white whale – his head full of Turner’s spumey paintings he’d seen in London that year – Melville read The Tempest and drew a box around Prospero’s ‘quiet words’, the magician’s wry response to his daughter’s naïve exclamation on seeing the aliens:

      Miranda. O! wonder!

      How many goodly creatures are there here!

      How beauteous mankind is! Oh brave new world,

      That has such people in’t!

      Prospero. ’Tis new to thee

      Melville, himself the scion of a colony, saw the prophecy in Shakespeare’s drama and in Turner’s art: both helped him create the strange, ominous world of Moby-Dick. In it, Captain Ahab is a monomaniacal Prospero, and as the opening of The Tempest is lit by St Elmo’s fire, so the same eerie light garlands his ship, the Pequod, in a ghostly glow; animals acquire symbolic meaning – whales and birds accompany the narrative as familiars, swimming and flying alongside the story – and the sea rises up as if with a mind of its own, as it does in Turner’s paintings. Meanwhile mortal men pursue their deadly trade: a restive crew sails into the unknown – among them a tattooed cannibal, Queequeg, a kind of Caliban – and Ahab blasphemously baptises his harpooneers in the name of the devil. Nor would the American’s fascination with Shakespeare’s play end there. At the end of his own last work, Billy Budd, Melville imagines the hanged body of his Handsome Sailor consigned to the deep, entangled in oozy weeds; it is an echo of Jonah’s fate in a biblical sea – ‘where the eddying depths sucked him ten thousand fathoms down, and the weeds were wrapped about his head’ – but also of Alonso in The Tempest, who, believing his son to be drowned, wishes he too was ‘mudded in that oozy bed’.

      Constantly recreated, constantly re-enacted, The Tempest lived on beyond its creator, passed on from hand to hand. It became a secret cipher, a futuristic shipping forecast, an extended magical spell. It conjured a queer sea out of its strange beasts and its masquerades, and stood against time and tide even as it rose with them in a storm stirred up by a dramatist whose own identity still seems fluid and uncertain.

      As a new century loomed, the play gained momentum, gathering clouds rather than diminishing with distance and time. A few years after Melville left Billy Budd on his desk unpublished, another former sailor, Joseph Conrad, drew on The Tempest for his Heart of Darkness, with Kurtz as a terrible Prospero. Two decades later, Eliot embedded fragments of the play in The Waste Land, as if Shakespeare had foreseen the undone. Eliot’s work was rivered with the brown god of the Thames and the ship-wrecked, sea-monstered coast of New England he’d sailed as a boy; and as his Madame Sosotris lays out the Tarot card of the drowned Phoenician Sailor – ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes’ – she warns ‘Fear death by water.’ Meanwhile, the bones of another sailor, ‘a fortnight dead’, are picked clean by the creatures of the sea, the slimy things the Ancient Mariner saw down there.

      Haunted and haunting, The Tempest accompanied the twentieth century as a parallel rite; few other works of art have been so replicated, remodelled, and re-presented. W.H. Auden reimagined its characters’ fates in his verse drama The Sea and the Mirror; Aldous Huxley drew on it ironically for his brave new world; and the science-fiction film Forbidden Planet turned Ariel into Robbie the robot for an era fearful of its own aliens. And at the end of the darkened nineteen-seventies – as a British satellite named Prospero spun into outer space, following its fellow transmitter, Ariel, launched a decade earlier – Derek Jarman, living in a London warehouse on the Thames and fascinated by John Dee, filmed his alchemical version as ‘a chronology of three hundred and fifty years of the play’s existence’, with Prospero played by the future author of Whale Nation, a sibilant blind actor nicknamed Orlando as Caliban, an androgynous man-boy as Ariel, and Elisabeth Welch singing ‘Stormy Weather’ surrounded by dancing sailors. In this lineage of otherness, filled with hermaphrodites and shape-shifters, it does not seem a coincidence that the director wanted Ariel’s songs to be sung by the starman who obsessed me, and who presided over my blue notebook.

      The word ‘tempest’ itself derives from the Latin tempus, for time. Everything is new and old on Prospero’s island. Like the sea itself. Always changing, always the same.

      Out of the blackness obscure noises drift from the docks, booming over the water. The red lights of the power-station chimney blink like an industrial lighthouse, summoning and warning. You can be what you want to be in the dark. For me, it used to be nightclubs under London streets. Now it’s another nocturnal performance.

      An hour before dawn, before the light starts to stain the summer sky violet, I ride back to the beach. Foxes sidle out of the woods and rabbits flash their white scuts at the approach of my bike light. High in the trees over the shore, a pair of tawny owls converse in screeches. Crows hang in the branches, all angular tails and beaks, as if they’d been born out of the boles. All these creatures own this place in the interregnum of the dark; they should not be anywhere else. No one could have told you when you were young what would happen. They didn’t dare. It’s enough to realise that what we have lost is still ahead of us. I see things that are not there.

      One magical moment; I feel like a penitent. The sea is so still it seems like a sin to break its surface. But I do. Swimming at night, with diminished sense of sight, only makes the act all the more sensual. You feel the water around you; you lose yourself in its sway. Fish bite me, leaving loving grazes.

      I turn on my back, watching the stars fall.

      I first saw it slumped on the weedy slipway one afternoon. A deer, sprawled at the high water mark. It looked perfect, lying there, thrown up by the tide, staring glassy-eyed to the sky. Had it died trying to swim across from the forest? Or had it slipped and fallen, cloven hoofs clattering on the concrete with panic in its eyes? Perhaps it had been shot, although there was no wound in its russet pelt.

      The next day someone had СКАЧАТЬ