DWill wrote:Oh, right, the word has "quip" in it. Interesting about your readability stats. I did not find the vocab full of 50 cent words, nor the syntax to be intricate. Maybe the character of sailor accounts for the plainer speech, or maybe I'm wrong in my recollection of Poe.
Great quip, must have been one of Shaw’s. A fifty cent word dates from telegraph days when people were charged by the letter. I was in Alice Springs last week and visited the old telegraph station which was opened in 1872, shortening the communication time to the old country from two months to one day.
DWill wrote:
The "ancient mariner" (though only made old by the terror of his experience) becomes after his initial horror fascinated by the terrible beauty of the maelstrom, having no hope of surviving in it anyway. His descriptions remind me of the concept of the sublime that was current with Romantics like Poe, in which nature was awe-full and terrifyingly magnificent, and of course indifferent to measly man.
Yes, there is a touch of Coleridge and the albatross in this story. My commentary on the poem of the grey beard loon at
post84467.html#p84467 looks at the sublime terror of the ice and fate.
DWill wrote:
No way to have a story, though, unless sailor gets himself ejected from the whirlpool, so he shakes off the Circean spell of the vortex and employs his good old Norwegian ingenuity. This is very "American" of him, too.
I like your mention of Circe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circe , who of course was the enchantress who befuddled Ulysses, and the origin of holy moly, at least according to Hermes. It was after leaving the year with Circe that Ulysses arrived at the Charybdis, an event with some similarity to the Maelstrom. Yankee can do know how seems to figure in the ejection, with perhaps a nod to the old Europeans going down with the ship.
DWill wrote:
The mechanics of this mighty ocean vacuum are interesting, and I wonder how Poe worked them out. Although obviously fantastical, he creates plausibility for the general reader. Science may say no.
This inexorable vortex is explained at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhirlpoolDWill wrote:
What a bummer for him that his fishing buddies don't quite believe his tale!
I used this story in my novel The Jug, transposing the events from Norway to a near-future collapse of the Antarctic ice sheets causing a global tsunami and floods.
post160277.html#p160277
I meant also to mention, from the commentary I linked above,
https://www.eapoe.org/pstudies/ps1970/p1973108.htm
incomprehensibility of the scientific explanation of the Maelstrom — that is, the theory of colliding currents . Then there is also a more subtle indication of his agreement. When the narrator first sights the vortex from the summit of Helseggen, he says to the sailor, “This . . . can be nothing else than the great whirlpool of the Maelstrom”. The sailor’s reply is a gentle correction of his companion’s appellation. “ ‘So it is sometimes termed,’ said he. ‘We Norwegians call it the Moskoe-strom, from the island of Moskoe in the midway’”. The name is accepted by the first narrator, for the next time he refers to the vortex, he calls it the Moskoe-strom. But the point lies not merely in the acceptance of a new name; rather it lies in the implications of the name. In rejecting “Maelstrom,” the sailor is rejecting a definition: “the stream that whirls round and grinds” or “the grinding stream.” He is thus rejecting man’s efforts to define — and so to limit and control — chaotic Nature.
This reminds me of Hamlet’s Mill, with its discussion of how the Norse Myth of the cosmic mill ground out gold, then iron, then sand, as it fell off its axis with the precession of the equinox. I like this analysis of Poe's idea about the whirlpool as an uncontrollable force of nature.