The ocean of surging emotion

Abstract

This article explores how Symbolist cognitive poetics governs links between the form of the poem and the visual and non-visual imagery pertaining to spiritual transcendence. It investigates how this experience is iconically represented via the blending of human and water ontologies in the poem “Feather Grass” (1895) by the Russian Symbolist poet Konstantin Bal'mont. The emergent structure of this blend, observed throughout Bal'mont’s poetry, points to flux and permeability of the human emotional terrain, including emotional memory. The blend consistently maps the transition from the earthly to the spiritual as a continuous fluid transmutation or liquescence (Kostetskaya 2015: 413). It facilitates the dissolution of various boundaries and the removal of the central Symbolist duality of realia (concrete reality) versus realiora (the true reality of the innermost and supra-material spheres). The liquescence of emotional fabric manifests itself across various features of the poem, such as prosody, rhyme, sound pattern and repetition. The structure of the poem blends various liquescent topologies in order to render non-representational sensations associated with the evocation of emotional memory: it is circular, reminiscent of rings formed on a water surface when a stone is thrown in; simultaneously, it is vertical representing the dynamics of sinking and rising; it also evokes the idea of water as a prototypical mirror.