The title of Robert Southey's poem "Inchcape Rock" is based on folktales surrounding a real reef in Scotland named Inchcape Rock or the Bell Rock. This reef is located in the North Sea, off the coast of Angus county. It was a major navigational hazard, responsible for over 100 shipwrecks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The reason for this is that the reef is barely visible at low tide and completely submerged under water at...
The title of Robert Southey's poem "Inchcape Rock" is based on folktales surrounding a real reef in Scotland named Inchcape Rock or the Bell Rock. This reef is located in the North Sea, off the coast of Angus county. It was a major navigational hazard, responsible for over 100 shipwrecks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The reason for this is that the reef is barely visible at low tide and completely submerged under water at high tide, making it invisible to mariners.
The legend of the bell attributes its construction to the fourteenth century Abbot of Aberbrothok who placed the bell on a buoy above the reef, warning mariners of the unseen hazard. Southey's poem was written sometime between 1796 and 1798; it was not until 1807 that work began on a lighthouse to safeguard mariners from the reef.
The title itself focuses our attention on the reef, itself a morally neutral natural object, that caused deaths to unwary seafarers, enabled the Abbot to expressed his good moral character, and was the means by which Sir Ralph lured mariners to their destruction and eventually himself to his own damnation.
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