A Siren’s song

Abstract

Caliban’s words in Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest, refer to a magical island replete with musical sound, not only through Ariel’s songs that charm Ferdinand to walk onto the “yellow sands”, but the very air sings the most ravishing music. It is an island that welcomes the shipwrecked Prospero and, at the end of the play, brings about the reconciliation to the conflict between him and his long-standing enemy, Alonso. It is an island where differences are dissolved rather than resolved; where time stands still; where, as Tennyson puts it in ‘The Lotos-Eaters’, “it seemed always afternoon” and where you expect the “poppy [to] hang in sleep”.