“the Little Warlike World Within”: Exposing The Colonial History Of The Ocean In The Poetry Of Percy Bysshe Shelley

Man marks the earth with ruin his control
Stops with the shore upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed.
(Lord Byron, Childe Harold`s Pilgrimage,
Canto CLXXIX)

In his evocation of the sea, Byron here creates a conceptual distinction along the geographical impasse that is the shore : a realm in which man dominates and exploits the land in which he marks the earth with ruin is placed in opposition to one in which man himself becomes the ruin , in which the wrecks are all [the ocean`s] deed . Here, man`s historical agency is apparently void, in the face of the awesome power of the ocean.
This dichotomy of land and sea is a rigid one, not only in the geographical sense, but in this sense of its symbolic potential too: the ocean`s conquering anti-humane power is often set in relief against what WH Auden has described as the trivial shore life (1951: 23). Edmund Burke evokes a similar sense of oceanic sublimity as opposed to land:

A level plain of a vast extent of land, is certainly no mean idea, the prospect of such a plain may be as extensive as a prospect of the ocean: but can it ever fill the mind with anything so great as the ocean itself? the ocean is an object of no small terror (Burke, in Raban, 2001: 8).

We are interested less in the notion of the sublime here than in the depiction of the ocean for itself: the ocean becomes simply an object , a prospect , something extensive that merely occupies space but is in itself a space rendered empty of human life, a space beyond human comprehension and control .
More recently, this sublime image of an othered and fearsome ocean has been seen as a part of a romantic perspective of the sea, that has focused on the conflict between man and nature at the expense of, and through the misrepresent[ation] or omi[ssion of,] vital segments of the seaman`s experience (Rediker, 1993: 5). This misrepresentation, I would like to argue, is part of a larger omission of the actual historical potential as opposed to the symbolic, poetic potential of the ocean: the sea needs rather to be analyzed as a deeply historical location whose transformative power is not merely psychological or metaphorical as its frequent use as a literary motif suggests but material and very real (Klein and Mackenthun, 2004: 2). Indeed, whilst the romantic perspective seen above seems to dominate the period, it is possible to read this material and very real historical evocation of the ocean in some of the poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, a figure whose early death by drowning has since permanently tied his legend to the image of the sea. Through a comparison focusing mainly on Shelley`s short lyric poem, Time in which the ocean is directly compared to the movements of history and A Vision of the Sea an eccentric burlesque narrating the wrecking of a ship whose human crew cower alongside exotic chained tigers what appears is a figuration of the ocean as a historical and human space, not just to seen in prospect , but also in which is enacted the colonial struggles of the age.

The Romantic conception of the sea as a prospect , a space for meditative contemplation in its extensive and homogenised sublimity, has been recently criticised as symbolistically enacting an erasure of history through a soporific and solipsistic individualism (Rediker, 1993: 5). Yet, even contemporaneous to the second wave of romanticism, this conventional image of the sea had already been scrutinised, satirised, and revealed as inadequate. Jane Austen, in her late, unfinished novel, Sanditon, tells of a Sir Edward, who

began to talk of the sea and the sea shore and ran with energy through all the usual phrases employed in praise of their sublimity, and descri ptive of the undescribable emotions they excite The terrific grandeur of the ocean in a storm, its glassy surface in a calm its quick vicissitudes, its direful deceptions, its mariners tempting it in sunshine, and overwhelmed by the sudden tempest (Austen, 2001: 43).

Austen`s pastiche of the romantic evocation of the sea consolidates the idea of its literary levelling, its verbal and symbolic homogenisation above and beyond the visual levelling enacted by Burke. In Austen`s form, the ocean passes into an historical, but also a geographical, clich : the abstracted evocation of sublimity , and the self-consciously formulaic details that follow it, prise the language away from the particularity and reality of the ocean as experienced. Indeed, the experience becomes undescribable because it is revealed, by Austen`s irony, as inauthentic, second-hand, and inadequate: its language therefore describes only a totality whose essence is emptiness, and whose anonymous mariners are precisely the types romanticised, situated in prospect and known only from a contemplative and literary distance.

This precise evacuation of experiential and historical reality noted by Austen features prominently in a representative of the second-wave of romanticism, John Keats. The very title of his sonnet, On the Sea , performs precisely the erasure of historical and local actuality referred to by Austen and theorised by Klein and Mackenthun, whilst the continuous present tense of those eternal whisperings , which keep[ ] being audible (CP, p. 101 l. 1) consolidates this at erasure at the verbal level of the text. Keats indulges in those clich s at which Austen smirks, yet whilst Austen`s recognition of clich is staged within the context of satirical social conversation, Keats rather asserts the centrality of his individualism. His anonymous and homogeneous sea becomes a Desolate space (l. 2) for the escape from or, as for Byron, in opposition to the ruinous engagements of such society: too much dimm`d with uproar rude (11) or with eyeballs vex`d and tir`d (9), Keats suggests, that ye find solitary solace in that prospect of the ocean. Indeed, the wideness (10) of the sea appears, for the poet, to be the sea`s primary appeal, its negative quality, the fact that it is empty, asocial, noiseless: to Keats, and to Austen`s Sir Edward, the sea`s attraction is in its sublime absence of human history and interference.

The romantic period does, however, offer an antidote to this atemporal of forgetting and oblivion (Klein and Mackenthun, 2004: 1). Percy Shelley, in two of his poems on the subject Time , A Vision of the Sea adamantly insists, comparatively, upon the image of the sea as a deeply historical location , a space material and very real . His short lyric Time , for example, explicitly frames the ocean in this historical dimension: not only is it figured as though waves are years, / Ocean of Time (CPW, 709: 1-2) but its waters of deep woe / Are brackish with the salt of human tears (2-3), are themselves materially constituted by human struggle and contestation, are alive with the traces of history.
It is possible to consider Shelley`s historicisation of the ocean in the terms of a well-established critical tradition which interprets the image of the ship upon the sea as a symbol of society, as a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion (Gilroy, 1993: 4), or more specifically as a metaphor for society in danger (Auden, 1951: 19), a society moving through a fluctuating history. Although Time can be seen swiftly to take this image to its ultimate moment, as these ship-societies figure, not merely as in danger , but specifically as wrecks , as Byronic ruins consumed and vomite[d] (CPW, 710: 7), Shelley extends the possibilities of this metaphor in his longer fragment, A Vision of the Sea . Here, the wrecking of the ship of the society is comparatively seen in action, as Shelley presents a vision of what appears to be the crew`s macabre daily routine:

And even and morn
With their hammocks for coffins, the seamen aghast
Like dead men the dead limbs of the comrades cast
Down the deep
their grave-clothes unbound (CPW, 664: 52-6)

The crew`s life and labour the vital segments of the seaman`s experience are literally infused with the danger in which the micro-political system finds itself: every aspect of of their shared experience their hammocks for coffins , their grave-clothes , and even they themselves, who like dead men appear may be highly symbolic of a cultural disaster, one in which only the Beauty and Innocence of the mother and baby are saved (Ketcham, 1978: 56). The lack of any situating allusion, however, and the absence of any specific symbolic tenor in this conception of the ship, appear themselves to prevent the historicising process that Shelley is finally seen to enact.

Auden`s conception of this ship-society remains useful, even if only with modification. Indeed, what Auden`s appreciation of the symbolic potential of the ship fails to take into account is the rather counter-intuitive cultural solipsism of its oceanic vision: as Keats offers the sea as an escape from the uproar rude of social interaction, the image of the ship-society moving in isolation through the wash of history only accomplishes a cultural or societal escape from a transcultural, indeed global, politics. Shelley`s sinking ship populated by exotic, culturally alien, and, notably, chain[ed] tigers alongside the working crew invites one comparatively to place the sea, as historicized, in the frame of what Mary Louise Pratt has called contact zones : rather than an arena for an isolated, intra-cultural experience, the sea as a global geographic phenomena becomes that space where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power (Pratt, 1991: 34). As opposed to the evacuation of the human from the ocean perpetrated by Byron, Burke, and Keats, Shelley describes a marine world whose history is one of fraught intercultural politics.
Therefore, whilst the poetic dramatisation of the shipwreck can hardly be said to be particularly unconventional borrowed as that in the Vision is from Coleridge`s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (McEathron, 1994: 170-192) Shelley`s own use of the image appears to be so: not only is it a fragment whose critical history has had it apparently ostracised from the poet`s canon (Ketcham, 1978: 52), but it also stages a moment of highly destructive and, if bizarrely graphic, at least material and very real cultural contact. If Keats`s own ocean is a space populated by sea-nymphs (CP, 102: 14), and his alien lands beyond the sea are figured merely as the romanticised and mythologised faery lands forlorn (348: 70), Shelley`s sea comparatively becomes a space in which those historical processes to which Spratt refers are enacted: the mingled voice / Of slavery and command (CPW, 264: 30-1), to which the voice of Ocean Shelley`s Prometheus Unbound alludes, is audible throughout Shelley`s Vision :

Are those
Twin tigers, who burst, when the waters arose,
In the agony of terror their chains in the hold,
(What now makes them tame, is what then made them bold)
Who crouch side by side ? (CPW, 664: 39-43).

The extended narrative of these enchained and subdued tigers, these exotic creatures, these living relics of colonial plunder, cowering in brotherhood, finds parallels in the conventional conception of the slave experience. But whilst Shelley`s concern, as we have seen, is not with merely symbolising this experience, the tigers themselves more generally belie a sense of forced geographical dislocation, of a displacement perpetrated by the colonial impulses of the marine world that is obviating. In a highly asymmetrical relationship of power, the tigers` lives end, after a brief struggle in an hostile and alien environment, with the arrival of a rescuing ship, loaded with marksmen (666: 155) which quickly despatch the colonial subjects into oblivion: they enter a state of refuge and ruin (157), a ruin caused by the very man whose control Byron believed to be left at the shore .

This brief exploration of Shelley`s poetry has revealed a sense of the sea that, like Austen`s own, is resistant to the obviating sense of the sea merely as a space for generalised clich and of narcissistic contemplation and societal escape. Instead, Shelley`s sea is alive with history, saturated with the salt of human tears . Unlike Burke, Byron, and Keats before him, Shelley, through the conventional image of the shipwreck, rather depicts an ocean manically busy with cultural encounters, an ocean in which a material and very real transcultural history of violence and displacement is enacted.

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