Ariel's Song Explained
"Ariel's song" is a verse passage in Scene ii of Act I of William Shakespeare's The Tempest. It consists of two stanzas to be delivered by the spirit Ariel, in the hearing of Ferdinand. In performance it is sometimes sung and sometimes spoken. There is an extant musical setting of the second stanza by Shakespeare's contemporary Robert Johnson, which may have been used in the original production around 1611.[1]
It is the origin of the phrase "full fathom five", after which there are many cultural references, and is an early written record of the phrase sea change.
Through its use of rhyme, rhythm, assonance, and alliteration, the poem sounds like a spell.[2]
"Full fathom five"
"Full fathom five" is the beginning of the second stanza of "Ariel's song",[3] better known than the first stanza, and often presented alone. It implicitly addresses Ferdinand who, with his father, has just gone through a shipwreck in which the father supposedly drowned.
Selected cultural references
- Parts or all of it have been set to music by Henry Purcell (alternatively attributed to John Weldon, The Tempest), Igor Stravinsky (Three Songs from William Shakespeare), Arthur Sullivan (The Tempest), Ralph Vaughan Williams (Three Shakespeare Songs), Pete Seeger (Two from Shakespeare), John Zorn, Marianne Faithfull, Laurie Anderson, and Caroline Shaw.
- On the gravestone of Percy Bysshe Shelley in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome the lines “Nothing of him that doth fade, / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.” are engraved. His open boat, on which he sailed the day he drowned, was called ‘Ariel’.
- Rich and Strange, a 1931 film by Alfred Hitchcock
- In The Waste Land, TS Eliot references "Those are pearls that were his eyes" on multiple occasions.
- In Cibola Burn, a novel by James S. A. Corey, a character references the line "Of his bones are coral made".
- Jackson Pollock painting titled “Full Fathom Five” … critic Ellen Johnson said of this piece “[It] is especially rich… Several foreign objects are embedded in its oil and aluminum paint; but the thumb tacks, pennies, cigarettes, paint tube tops, matches, etc., are only discovered with very close scrutiny. Lost in the life of the painting, they ‘suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange.’” From: “Jackson Pollock and Nature,” in Studio International 185:956 (June 1973), 260.
See also
Notes and References
- http://www0.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/Full_fathom_five_%28Robert_Johnson_II%29 Full fathom five (Robert Johnson II)
- Fain . John Tyree . Some Notes on Ariel's Song . Shakespeare Quarterly . 1968 . 19 . 4 . 329–332 . 10.2307/2868488 . 10 January 2023 . 0037-3222.
- http://www.potw.org/archive/potw190.html "Poem of the Week" site
