Eliot's Mermaids

[dan131m]

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?

[necromercurian]

i looked up the urashima taro story,and in one telling of it the man instead of opening the box of his old age,turned to dust because noone could live to be older then 300...which prompts the question,could this relate to other poems,..."i will show you fear in a handful of dust",from the wastelands...a frivolous connection,perhaps,but oh the dangers of curiosity.

[acdouglas92]

Wow! I was just pondering the mermaid stanza awhile ago! What a coincidence.
Generally, I interpret them to enhance the general meaning of the poem, as in enhance the idea of passivity. The mermaids, as superficially interpreted, linger in the chambers of the sea until human voices drown them. Thus, they do not act, they wait for things to happen. I think they reflect Prufrock's own passivity in the rest of the poem.

Again, kudos for starting this thread!

[Virgil]

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?

Interesting theory, but I'm skeptical. This was an early poem and even if Pound had ventured into Japanese literature, I don't think Pound was influencing Eliot yet at this point. I just doesn't ring correct for me. But it's something to keep in mind in the event there may be some other corroborating support turn up in the future.

[AuntShecky]

Eliot added his footnotes to the poem, in which he acknowledged the source for the symbolic material, namely the Fisher King sequence inFrom Ritual to Romance by Jesse Weston, as well as Frazier's The Golden Bough. The closing sequences derive from the Upanishad, of Indian origin.

I have no idea whether Eliot employed a source of Japanese origin, but this allusion

i looked up the urashima taro story,and in one telling of it the man instead of opening the box of his old age,turned to dust because noone could live to be older then 300...which prompts the question,could this relate to other poems,..."i will show you fear in a handful of dust",from the wastelands...a frivolous connection,perhaps,but oh the dangers of curiosity.

reminded me of the epigraph to the poem, the Latin quotation concerning the question asked of --and answered by the Sibyll at Cumae. (Save this translation--from the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry -- as it isn't given in the poem itself and is difficult to find elsewhere.):

"For I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl hanging in a jar at Cumae, and when the acolytes said, 'Sibyl, what do you wish?' she replied, 'I wish to die.' "
-- Petronious, Satyricon

The Norton editors add, "Apollo had granted the Sibyl eternal life but not eternal youth, and consequently her body shrivelled up until she could be put in a bottle."