Dante Gabriel Rossetti

A Sea-Spell

A SEA-SPELL

Shadowed lute

The lute hangs unused while she casts her spell with bare hands—the instrument is a prop, not the source of her power.

HER lute hangs shadowed in the apple-tree,
While flashing fingers weave the sweet-strung spell
Between its chords; and as the wild notes swell,
The sea-bird for those branches leaves the sea.
But to what sound her listening ear stoops she?
What netherworld gulf-whispers doth she hear,
In answering echoes from what planisphere,

Planisphere

A planisphere is a star chart. She's not just hearing the sea—she's tuned into cosmic frequencies, positioning her as both witch and astronomer.

Along the wind, along the estuary?
She sinks into her spell: and when full soon
Her lips move and she soars into her song,
What creatures of the midmost main shall throng

Summoning rune

Runes are carved letters used in Norse magic. The siren's song isn't just music—it's written spell-work calling up sea monsters.

In furrowed surf-clouds to the summoning rune:
Till he, the fated mariner, hears her cry,
And up her rock, bare-breasted, comes to die?

Bare-breasted

He strips himself climbing to her—the only moment of male action in the poem, and it's self-destruction presented as erotic compulsion.

Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Siren as Artist

Rossetti painted this poem's subject—a red-haired woman with a dulcimer, surrounded by swooning seabirds—the same year he wrote it (1877). The painting and poem are companion pieces, both titled *A Sea-Spell*. The model was Alexa Wilding, his favorite in the late 1870s after Elizabeth Siddal's death.

The poem reverses the usual siren story. Normally sirens are passive singers waiting on rocks. Here she's actively working magic—"flashing fingers weave the sweet-strung spell." The verbs are all craft and labor: weave, sinks, soars, summons. She's not performing; she's manufacturing enchantment.

Notice the two-stage spell: first she calls the sea-bird (line 4), then "creatures of the midmost main" (line 11), finally the mariner (line 13). She's practicing, building power. The poem is structured as a zoom-out from her hands to increasingly distant victims. The dramatic question isn't whether he'll die—it's what else she's summoning first.

What She's Listening To

Lines 5-8 are one long question about where her power comes from. She's not generating the spell—she's receiving it. "What netherworld gulf-whispers doth she hear?" The source is below (netherworld, gulf) and beyond (planisphere, wind, estuary). She's a medium, channeling something older than herself.

Estuary is the key word. It's where river meets sea, fresh water meets salt—a threshold space. The whole poem is about thresholds: between sea and land, music and magic, listening and singing. She "sinks into her spell" (line 9) before she "soars into her song" (line 10)—down then up, receiving then transmitting.

The final image—"bare-breasted, comes to die"—makes the mariner's death explicitly sexual. But whose desire is it? He's compelled, stripped, climbing. She never moves from her rock. Rossetti's siren is passive and omnipotent at once, which is exactly how the Pre-Raphaelites painted feminine power: still, beautiful, and absolutely lethal.