Fragmented Images of Christ in Romantic Maritime Poetry

Abstract

This chapter studies the role played by Christian and biblical allusion in the relationship between shipwreck and fragmentation in poetry. Established paradigms such as the spiritual conversion of sailors during storms and the redemptive power of prayer during trauma, found in many eighteenth-century texts, begin to unravel in the Romantic period as the figure of Christ is problematised in shipwreck poetry. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “A Vision of the Sea” (1820) and Felicia Hemans’s “Casabianca” (1826) show how the human experience of shipwreck and faith becomes less prescriptive as the images that symbolise Christ can be futile or radical. By exploring how a broken poetic form reflects the image of the shattered objects it portrays, the chapter discusses how ideological fragmentation can be implied by literary technique and argues that fragmenting both text and symbolism works together to shape a specifically Romantic figure of the function of Christ on stormy waters.