Casey N. Cep navigates an enduring poetic metaphor – the shipwreck:
Shipwrecks have engaged the poetic imagination for centuries. Remnants of several million shipwrecks are estimated to rest on the ocean floor. When sailing was the only way of navigating the world, shipwrecks were fierce, living terrors; even now, as other modes of transportation dominate travel, shipwrecks maintain their prominence in metaphors of isolation and ennui as well as in images of wreckage and destruction. Ships themselves still wreck in poetry, but so, too, do relationships, souls, and states.
Her take on Shelley’s “Adonais,” featured above:
The narrative of Shelley’s life was revised so that all of its features foreshadowed his shipwreck. His early love of sailing, beginning with paper boats made from bank notes, became ominous; his earlier brushes with shipwrecks—most notably in the decade before he died, on the Rhine River with his wife and on Lake Geneva with Lord Byron—ceased to be signs of providence, becoming instead portentous siren songs. Lines from Shakespeare’s The Tempest were even taken for his epitaph: “Nothing of him that doth fade, / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.”
Shelley’s poetry was not spared this revision. His elegy for John Keats, written a year before his own death, was suddenly taken for prophecy. The final stanza of “Adonais” laments: “My spirit’s bark is driven, / Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng / Whose sails were never to the tempest given.” Shelley, like Keats, was understood to have been prematurely and tragically “borne darkly, fearfully, afar.” His shipwreck came to symbolize both his life and work, not only his death.
(Video: Mick Jagger reading a passage from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats,” just days after his former Rolling Stones band mate Brian Jones was found dead floating in a swimming pool.)
The Dish 