The only time that I can sneak into the bathhouse is in the midnight, when everyone is in their beds asleep, when the hot water stops running from the mouths of the marble lions around the bath pool so the water is cool enough, and when I am all alone. As I lay myself into the water, my waist below joints, I can feel my legs mingle together, wrapped with another skin so tight, and covered with fish scales in the color of aqua that glimmer under the moonlight through the window. Then from the tips of my toes expand an enormous fish-like caudal tail. Here is the only place that I can reveal my true form. Though my movement seems bound, it is in fact the time when I actually feel free. It was not until by my age of four did my body started to have this kind of transformation when I was put into the water. I remembered Mother nearly fainted, and she assumed that she must be cursed to have given birth to such an inhuman creature. Since the day after, my parents looked at me in a disgusted way as if I were a demon which would bring adversity to this house. Father imprisoned me in a small cabin near a pond in the forest—they segregated me, still kept me secretly, for no one would wash their dirty linens in the public. They fed me everyday just to keep me alive, but that was all they did. They believed that if I died, the evil spirit of mine would remain and took revenge. I knew I was no longer loved, and I knew that they were waiting, waiting for the chance to drive me out. Father and Mother never worried about that I might escape away due to my inability of speaking. My words were aerial, merely fricatives or nasals to them, so they deemed me a dull nuisance. However, they never knew that everything got reversed in the water. Un... ... middle of paper ... ... the mare, and the salty breeze gently shave across my face. I listen to the sound it makes when the wave hit against the reeves, which I assure it belongs to my language. Step by step, I walk into the water, immersed my waist below in it. As I turn around and take a final glance at him, I sink into the brine. The current washes my clothes away, and I feel revived. The sun now has risen, so I swim near the reef that the prince stands on, wishing to leave a gift for him. I hand him the pearls I preserve. He is astounded, yet nods as if he knew what to do with them. I smile and disappear myself into the deep blue. Near the end of the day, when the sun turns into tangerine and dyes the sea with its reddish beam, I hear a loud splash behind me. Then a voice rises from the very bottom of the ocean, welcoming the figure that jumped in and says, “Welcome home, my prince.”
“I had been born into a raging ocean where I swam relentlessly, flailing my arms in hope of rescue, of reaching a shoreline I never sighted. Never solid ground beneath me, never a resting place. I had lived with only the desperate hope to stay afloat; that and nothing more. But when at last I wrote my first words in the page, I felt an island rising beneath my feet like the back of a whale”.
You are submerged in the tub of yourself—,” (Lines 11-12). The entire concept of the individual’s “tub” is now a construct of a person’s personality, and therefore each person is their own
The ocean is mysterious to mankind. The unfathomable vastness of the ocean intrigues humanity into exploring it. In life, the immense possibilities that lie in the future compel us to reach for the stars. In the poem “The Story” by Karen Connelly, an individual willingly swims into deep waters even though they are fearful of what may exist in the waters. The swimmer later finds out that their fears were foolish, which illustrates the human tendency to venture into the unknown. The theme conveyed in this poem is that life is like a rough, uncertain, uncontrollable ocean that we must find get through with experience.
“The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.”
The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace (Chopin 25).
Under the sea, in an idyllic and beautiful garden, stands a statue of a young man cut out of cold stone – for the Little Mermaid who knows nothing but the sea, the statue stands as an emblem of the mysterious over-world, a stimulus for imagination and sexual desire, an incentive for expansion of experience, and most predominately, an indication that something great and all-encompassing is missing from her existence. Traces of curiosity and a vague indication of the complexities of adult desires mark the child mermaid; in such a stage of development, the statue will suffice. However, as the Little Mermaid reaches puberty, the statue must allegorically come alive in order to parallel the manifestation of her new-found adult desires – the statue must become a prince in his world of adulthood above the sea. Thus, powered by an insistent and ambiguous longing for self-completion, the Little Mermaid embarks on a journey of self-discovery, and, to her ultimate misfortune, prematurely abandons her child-like self as sexual lust and the lust for an adult life takes hold of her.
I smiled to myself and decided that I would go join in. With that, I took a huge deep breath and jumped into the salty water. The water was cool and refreshing; I felt it slide through my hair making it sway in the water. I swam deeper and deeper into the deep blue water. Sunlight streamed through it, lighting up the water around me turning it to gold. I kicked harder and I felt my muscles surge with strength and I pushed further. My lunges began to burn for the need of oxygen, but I refused to go up. I repeatedly told myself just a little bit longer. Until I was unable to proceed anymore without more air in my lungs, I swam to the top of the water taking a huge breaths, filling my lungs with air. I could then taste the salty water as it ran down my face and dripped over my lips. Just then I thought, I will never forget this moment, this place, or the experiences I felt while visiting
Her first dive into the sea connects to her finally taking a plunge towards spiritual freedom, and furthers pulls out the defiance toward the status quo. Once connected to her inner demons, she listens less to her husband and does more of what she wants, such as not answering to callers of the house who come to visit.
...a and her response to it at the beginning of the fifth stanza. The speaker being “followed” by the sea shows its hunt after her. Repeating the pronoun “He” alerts us to her continuing terror after she escapes the immediate site of the vulnerability. The sexualized motions of the sea follows the speaker’s that signal a transformation from the sexual aggressor to just a responsive partner from the sea’s part. When the speaker’s sexual urges and energies awakened or started, they outstrip those of the previous aggressive sea and exceed them in enjoinment. The repetition of “he” serves to discriminate the speaker’s state of arousal from the sea. When the speaker defines herself in terms “ankle” and “shoes,” she domesticates limits the irresistible sea with only these two phrases “his Silver Heel” and “ Pearl” because she restricts the sea to rise higher that her ankle.
This poem is full of visual imagery; one can imagine being the speaker, staring at the fish on the hook. The fish’s brown skin, shapes on his scales, the tiny white sea-lice, the green weed, the blood flowing from his gills, his entrails, and his pink bladder all describing the fish’s body. This allows the reader to imagine as if the fish was in their hands. She not only illustrates the fish as a whole but also ge...
Through metaphors, the speaker proclaims of her longing to be one with the sea. As she notices The mermaids in the basement,(3) and frigates- in the upper floor,(5) it seems as though she is associating these particular daydreams with her house. She becomes entranced with these spectacles and starts to contemplate suicide.
As we pulled out of my parents driveway, the circumstances seemed very surreal. My entire way of life had been turned upside down with only a few hours consideration. I was very much “at sea” in the ...
sees the prince from his ship, rescues him from drowning and falls in love with him. The sea
This morning I wake early from the light that creeps underneath my blinds and my bed next to the window. I wake floating on the streams of light, heated, like white wax spilled across the floor, dripping, soft. In bare feet I walk down the stairs, cold on the wood, and find my father in the kitchen, also awake early. Together, we leave the house, the house that my parents built with windows like walls, windows that show the water on either side of the island. We close the door quietly so as not to wake the sleepers. We walk down the pine-needle path, through the arch of trees, the steep wooden steps to the dock nestled in the sea-weed covered rocks. We sit silently on the bench, watch as the fog evaporates from the clear water. The trees and water are a painting in muted colors, silver and grays and greenish blue, hazy white above the trees.
Away from the immense sea, white foams from the waves gather gently onto the golden shore. Now, half of a glowing, radiant light looms across the water 's horizon. The sea turns blood-red and darkness creeps up like a thief. The necklace that once reflected its passionate energy of fury moments ago now resembled a mere costume jewellery. Perhaps the loss of the necklace’s elegance and sophistication was the reason to why it was disregarded. Pity the owner did not see the necklace radiating its splendour at its peak. Anyhow, the nightfall creates a sensation of joy and tranquillity in me. Every sight and sound stimulates a sense of composure and serenity; and the effect is heightened by the absence of the noisy bustle of our daily work, only to be exposed to the never-ending music of the waves, and to breathe the fresh air instead of the stale atmosphere of classrooms. It is not easy to describe the effect of this sight; it can only be strangely deciphered in my mind. It is however, a very tangible and distinct emotion, though its allure really depends upon the reality of the world from a further point of view, away from the definite predictabilities of the world, all in which an instant becomes like a translucent drape which almost consents me to catch a glimpse of a ideal and more breath-taking reality. The worldly desires, expectations, worries, schemes, suddenly cease to exist. It is as though all of