6 - The Sea of the Mind in Early Modern Poetry

Summary

Abstract

This chapter explores how and why early modern poets popularly compared the human mind to a turbulent sea. It first draws upon the work of Arthur Warren to argue that poets used marine imagery to establish a link between cognitive disorder and moral corruption. It then suggests that adaptations of the late sixteenth-century ballad ‘My minde to me a kingdome is’ reveal how human cognition was more broadly associated with erratic liquid environments through the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century.

Keywords: ballad, Bible, environments of the mind, mental turbulence, poetry

Mental distress was commonly portrayed as a form of liquid turbulence in early modern English literature. Biblical exegesis helped set this precedent. Take, for example, the interpretation of Abel's murder that the acclaimed evangelical preacher John King offers in his Lectures upon Jonas from 1597. King states that Cain, wracked with guilt, “ranne from place to place, not so much in his bodie, as in his minde, tossed like a wave of the sea, and finding no place for rest, because the mercy of God shone not unto him.” Portraying Cain's agitated “minde” as such neatly parallels how he is described in Genesis 4:12 as a “fugitive and a vagabounde” in possession of a “fearful conscience” that “findeth reste nowhere,” which, in turn, extends the elemental scope of Cain's punishment from the barren earth to the perpetual roiling of the mind's inner “sea.” Marine imagery helped convey the perturbation of thought that distinguishes the vulnerability of the human mind to sin, but this literary convention was not peculiar to morally didactic or theological literature. In this chapter, I contend that poets similarly portrayed the association between cognitive disorder and moral corruption through images of liquid unrest. While the study of the period's imaginative engagement with watery environments tends to concentrate on Shakespeare's oeuvre, I alternatively focus on non-canonical poets to enrich our understanding of the connections established between aquatic and mental environments in sixteenth and early seventeenth-century literary culture.