I am the voyage you will make alone: a reading of The Mermaid Room

by Nell Grey
Poem: The Mermaid Room
Poet: Charles Bennett
Published in: Wintergreen (Headland, 2001)

Mermaid lore can be traced back to the eighth century BC, and these mythical creatures have exercised their fascination over poets and writers throughout the ages – Hans Christian Anderson, Tennyson, W.B. Yeats, Robert Graves and Pablo Neruda to name but few. The mermaid evolved from ancient sea goddesses through the Greek sirens – birds with female heads who enticed sailors onto the rocks with their songs. During the Middle Ages the mermaid with her mirror and comb came to the Church to symbolise female vanity and the seduction and destruction of men. The lower half of her body represents the animalistic or sexual side of her nature, and part of her fascination seems to lie in this and the danger of the forbidden.

Traditionally she has no soul, although The Little Mermaid in Hans Christian Andersen's story gains a soul by her faithfulness.

Charles Bennett has said that his poem is about a mermaid, who, ‘at least once a year is magically transformed into a real woman, which means of course, that she gets legs and is able to walk.'

She begins by describing her room, which is like the inside of an oyster shell and all that that image conveys (glistening pearly slipperiness), simultaneously both a simile and a subtle sexual metaphor. The half-rhyme of shell with wall and the true rhyme of side with tide echo like the sound of the sea in a shell picked up on the beach. She goes on to tell us that at high tide the water reaches halfway up the wall, / the door can be opened without spilling a drop – magical, puzzling, yet that high tide hints at passion at its peak, the magical door at a taking in rather than a letting out or spilling. Is it emotion/feeling that's being alluded to here? There's a slight resonance too with those lines from Julius Caesar:

‘There is a tide in the affairs of men,

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune…'

Fortune comes later with the traces of gold beneath your nails. The image is of animal passion, perhaps even of clawing in greed, for the poem is partly about desire, and desire taken to extremes is a sort of greed. Yet there's magic here too in the connection of gold with alchemy and a passion so strong that it has been likened to sexual want and sickness in the phrases ‘lust for gold' and ‘gold fever'. But there will be only traces beneath your nails; satisfaction will not be achieved.

The second stanza, like the first, begins with the possessive My. The mermaid now lists her treasures. There's something touching about a toast rack and an eggcup , the half-rhyme of cup with drop carrying us forward from the first stanza. With a little black dress black echoes rack, simple things that make her seem uncomplicated. But if there was ever any doubt that her siren's nature remains unchanged, the stilettos (Germaine Greer's ‘fuck-me shoes') and the subsequent lines dispel it. Interestingly the number of wedding rings echoes the shape of the poem itself: twenty-seven is three times nine and there are nine stanzas, each with three lines, like a series of waves or swells. And three has historical significance as a magic number.

Now the voice and language become overtly seductive – smooch, astray, numbered door, commingling, and with the third stanza, and the first I am, the senses are brought fully into play. Autumn follows on from summer in the last line of the previous stanza as an almost subliminal progression. The words take on a lovely lyricism; lemongrass and cinnamon, cardamon, with those three (again the magic number) echoing 'mons'.

And now I've written that, I'm reminded of mons pubis, the mound of Venus, and Botticelli's Venus arriving on the shore in her shell. Is this how our mermaid arrives for her day on dry land? There's the sensual alliteration of smooch, saxophone, summer, shiver, sunlight, soft; floor, forest; cinnamon, cardamon, commingling, constellations; galangal – the repetition of 'gal' clanging like a ship's bell in the fog – and ginger . The exotic scents and hinted tastes of the spices: lemongrass and cinnamon ; cardamon – used in perfumes and as a stimulant, as well as in cookery; ginger – called the ‘universal medicine', one of its many uses is as an aphrodisiac; galangal – whose oil is valued in India for perfumery – is also a stimulant and sometimes used to treat seasickness.

The proximity of constellations and voyage suggests old methods of navigation and the effect of the sirens' song on ancient mariners. She's been playing this game for a long time.

Transience is implied with that numbered door – a hotel or rented room – again the words lead and leading speak of the siren, and astray tells us that those trophies, the twenty-seven wedding rings, are from the fingers of married men rather than men our mermaid has seduced into marrying her. One night is all they're allowed, for In the morning they'll find you in the harbour, presumably all washed up. Floor in the first line of the following stanza echoes door, pulling the reader seductively on.

I am, introduced mid-line in the third stanza, becomes more insistent with its new position at the beginning of the first lines of stanzas five and six, as well as with the repetition, which has a biblical feel. And it's certain that Robert Graves would have recognised the voice of the universal poetic muse, the White Goddess, in one of her many incarnations. The third I am (magic three again), marks the turn from the seductive voice to the unsettling – both in language and rhythm: alone , small, unstable, open boat. The rhythm is reminiscent of a choppy sea. The words are prophetic: I am the voyage you will make alone. And those ellipses after life suggest that there's more meaning to the last line than at first appears, even excluding the ambiguity of the word rest. This is confirmed in the next line, for unlike W.B.Yeat's mermaid in A Man Young and Old who ‘Forgot in cruel happiness / That even lovers drown', the actions of Charles Bennett's mermaid seem as much calculating as part of her nature.

Surreally, the mermaid's magic has changed her victim; even your death will be strange – your lungs full of daisies. Those AY sounds in daisies, snails and nails are like the sickly swell of the water itself, reinforced by the later troubled , a word often used to describe sea and water. (Simon and Garfunkle's Bridge over Troubled Water ). Safety (harbour) comes only with death. Confirmation of the mermaid's seductive powers is provided by those experts, the fishermen, who have seen that rapturous troubled look too many times, rapturous hinting at the Rapture of the Deep, better known these days as nitrogen narcosis. Nails becomes more noticeable after the rhyming snails, and fishermen occurring immediately afterwards forms a questionable connection with Christ on the cross; also the fish symbol associated with Christ. The poem echoes both with sound and allusions, that may or may not be deliberate, that may even themselves be delusions. It's as slippery and seductive as the mermaid herself.

But the mermaid will remain emotionally unmoved, like the cold fish she really is. She'll have had her breakfast – we can even imagine what that would be thanks to the toast rack and eggcup in the second stanza – but her time on terra firma will be up. She will already be returning to her true form, her face like a water-colour, overcome with rain; rain half-echoing with dream to end the poem.

The choice of the word overcome suggests that she can't help what she is, this is her nature and now she must return to her true element. And somehow I can't blame her. The beauty of the poem has somehow transcended gender and seduced me too. We've come full-circle, back again to the mermaid room of the title, where her face will be flickering like faces in a dream .

I love the way the poet has imagined himself into the mermaid's skin rather than writing about her, and it's interesting that, although we know this poem is written by a man, the mermaid's voice is completely believable.

Magical women appear often in Charles Bennett's poems – see A Woman made of Bees (Poetry London, autumn 2002) and Only Her Lips Remember and The Snowdrop Girl from the collection Wintergreen , in which The Mermaid Room appears. Here the mermaid seems to stand for that mysterious alluring aspect of woman that has fascinated men since Eve tempted Adam – magical, seductive, shapeshifting, something other, ultimately unknowable, her nature unchangeable.

 

 

Nell Grey was brought up in the South of England. Her dream from
an early age was to become an artist and writer, and having spent
most of her life achieving the first objective, exhibiting with The Society
of Women Artists, The National Acrylic Painters Association
and other societies, published her first novel, Solitary Pleasures, in 2003.
She lives in Sussex, and is the author of The Golden Web triology. A lifelong
fascination with mythology and the origins of religion led to the writing of Golden Web,
and she has recently completed illustrations for The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám,
a long cherished dream: http://www.nellgrey.co.uk/