Great Poems – Easy to Memorize:

William Shakespeare: “Ariel’s Song” from The Tempest:

Full fathom five thy father lies,

Of his bones are coral made:

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.

Hark! Now I hear them: ding, dong bell.

ii. 397-405, The Riverside Shakespeare

In form, the song consists of eight lines in one stanza or in two four line stanzas. I prefer it as one stanza because its momentum is not impeded. The content is surreal; I believe only Shakespeare would think of the fanciful resemblances of bones to coral and eyes to pearls. And, of course, this is the origin of the concept of “sea-change,” which denotes a very large change of some kind, and suggests an irreversible, irrevocable quality to the transformation.

Then, the imagery: the drowned father, yours and mine, whose fate was ship-wreck, the one of the most severe, if not the quintessential, disaster of the Elizabethan age, perhaps the equivalent of the crashing of a large commercial jet, a 747 for instance, today. In an age of seafaring exploration, shipwreck was a hazard many people had to chance. And death by water leads to the subsequent “rich and strange” transformations Shakespeare imagines: bones to coral, pearls to eyes.

Sea-nymphs, or Nereids, are female spirits of the oceans in Greek mythology, thought to move in attendance to Poseidon, the god of the oceans. A “knell” is a bell rung in English churches when a death occurred, as in the familiar quote of John Donne, “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” But rather than a sexton, or the clerk of a church, this knell for “your father” is rung by sea-nymphs, a little pagan twist on convention, reinforced by the use of the archaic “Hark!” The sea-nymphs are elevated to the status of priestesses, ministering condolence to the dead man they were unable to save. This little song of Shakespeare’s takes place in deeps, and only comes to the surface in the last line, when the speaker admonishes the audience to listen with him to the faint sounding of the bell. The little narrative is: the shipwreck, the slow transformation of the man’s bones to coral, and his eye’s to pearls, which savors, in a way, the irreversible momentum of death, the sea-change waiting for every human, followed by funeral rites and a new existence for the “father,” whose body has now been dispersed into the life of the ocean floor.

As far as poetic sound and musicality goes, this little song is extremely rich. Beginning with the striking alliteration of four “fs” in the first line; the “a” rhyme “lies” which will rhyme ultimately with “eyes,” is already rhymed with “five” and “thy” in the first line as well. The “b” rhymes “made” and “fade” are soft words, which are strongly contrasted with the more “mouthy” “change” and “strange.” The repetition of “that” in lines three and four, and the repetition of “doth” in lines four and five serve to subtly knit the transition from the beginning description to the conceptual middle of the song. “Sea-nymphs” is a nice echo of “sea-change;” and there is a nice internal rhyme between “ring” and “ding.” There are four strong beats per line, which makes the rhythm smooth and steady, only to be expected in a song, which was most likely accompanied with music, probably by a lute.

The salient features we’ve already covered in the imagery, but the overall mournful tone also conveys a deep wonder for the unpredictable ways and movements of the world.

(In regard to the last line, it’s interesting to note that when doorbells were invented in the early 1800s, a two note sound was created: one tone when the button is pressed and another when released, and it was called a “ding-dong” tone. So, oddly enough, the death-knell for the father announcing death, also anticipated, long before invented, the doorbell, which in the “father’s” case could be thought of as a kind of doorbell, signaling his entrance into a new realm.)