dan131m
04-16-2008, 12:00 AM
Since I first read Prufrock I'd always assumed that the closing lines alluded to the legend of Urashima Taro. As the story apparently isn't as canonical as I'd imagined, I'll give a brief summary:
A fisherman saves a turtle, to learn that she is in fact the daughter of the King of the Sea. He is rewarded with the ability to breathe underwater, a timeless and dreamlike existence among the merfolk, and a box which he is warned not to open. After some time he opens the box (the reasons vary from account to account) to awake an old man whose friends and family have long since died out; he learns that the box contained his old age.
The more I learned, the more this explanation locked itself into my head -- Ezra Pound's interest in Japanese literature and his influence over Eliot; the connection between the Rip van Winkle aspect of this story and that of the Irish "Voyage of Brain", set in The Land of Women; the version of the Japanese legend in which Taro opens the box out of his longing to hear a human voice after living among the mute mermaids...
It came as somewhat of a shock to me, then, when I casually brought this up in conversation and was met with blank stares from a number of quite well-read friends. Searching standard references and the internet I found absolutely no reference to this at all, and more curiously nothing elaborating on the mythological context for Eliot's mermaids. Can someone help me out here and fill me in on how the lines
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
are generally interpreted?
A fisherman saves a turtle, to learn that she is in fact the daughter of the King of the Sea. He is rewarded with the ability to breathe underwater, a timeless and dreamlike existence among the merfolk, and a box which he is warned not to open. After some time he opens the box (the reasons vary from account to account) to awake an old man whose friends and family have long since died out; he learns that the box contained his old age.
The more I learned, the more this explanation locked itself into my head -- Ezra Pound's interest in Japanese literature and his influence over Eliot; the connection between the Rip van Winkle aspect of this story and that of the Irish "Voyage of Brain", set in The Land of Women; the version of the Japanese legend in which Taro opens the box out of his longing to hear a human voice after living among the mute mermaids...
It came as somewhat of a shock to me, then, when I casually brought this up in conversation and was met with blank stares from a number of quite well-read friends. Searching standard references and the internet I found absolutely no reference to this at all, and more curiously nothing elaborating on the mythological context for Eliot's mermaids. Can someone help me out here and fill me in on how the lines
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
are generally interpreted?