ARIEL [Sings.] 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.
SPIRITS Ding dong.
ARIEL Hark, now I hear them.
SPIRITS Ding dong bell. (1.2.397-405)
Not a dance this time? But rather something (appropriately) deeper, more vivid, and more unsettling. The alliteration of the first line gives it a sinuous, whispered quality, but even as this music once again creeps by upon the waters, it is describing not surface but depth: full fathom five, thirty feet. Fathom five is paralleled by father lies, which the assonance of five–lies reinforces, but the apparent precision of the five fathoms is undone by the bizarre, dreamlike transformation of Ferdinand’s father which follows. It’s dreamlike partly because of the syntax: the word order almost suggests that his bones are made of coral and his eyes are made of pearl, whereas the grammar sets out the reverse, that his bones have been transformed to coral, and his eyes into pearls. But it’s dynamic, unstable, indistinct (as if seen through water, distorted by depth – by tears) – and also exotic, pearls and coral, luxurious and strange. (And also poetic: the first and only metamorphosis undergone by Ferdinand’s father the king is a transformation into poetry, as he becomes a bizarre blazon.) The king is apparently unchanging – nothing of him that doth fade, or decay, suffer corruption – but at the same time utterly transformed – suffering a sea-change into something rich and strange. (Sea-change, now used to mean a radical alteration on the basis of its usage here, is apparently Shakespeare’s coinage.) The conceit here is ultimately biblical, perhaps: in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul describes the resurrection of the dead: ‘for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed’. Here the King is not only being raised incorruptible in poetry but richly adorned – and everyone, including Ferdinand, will be changed. (And much earlier in the scene it was established that the King is not dead, whatever Ferdinand might believe.) Yet the sea nymphs still ring his knell, the bell – ding dong – which marks his death (the ringing of bells for the dead was one of the most stubbornly persistent pre-Reformation customs in Protestant England, as John Donne most famously attested). It is mournful, magical, otherworldly, a blend of the familiar (the bells a near-constant feature of the London soundscape) with the rich and strange, coral and pearls. There’s perhaps an echo of one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, Richard III, in which the doomed Clarence recounts a dream in which he has been pushed overboard by his brother Richard:
Methoughts I saw a thousand fearful wrecks,
Ten thousand men that fishes gnawed upon,
Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,
All scattered in the bottom of the sea.
Some lay in dead men’s skulls; and in the holes
Where eyes did once inhabit there were crept—
As ’twere in scorn of eyes—reflecting gems,
That wooed the slimy bottom of the deep
And mocked the dead bones that lay scattered by. (1.4.24-33)
Clarence’s vision is foreboding and grotesque; Ariel’s song (in part because it is a song) is both stranger (because sparser, less detailed: rich and strange are evocative, resonant adjectives, but wholly imprecise, emphatically non-visual, unlike Clarence’s speech) and more hopeful, promising beauty and transformation even with the sounds of funeral. Ships have bells too, of course… There are many music settings of Ariel’s song, including what may be the original, by Robert Johnson, which dates from at least 1613; the choral setting by Ralph Vaughan Williams is particularly evocative. Then of course there’s the 1947 painting by Jackson Pollock and the album by the Stone Roses…
