Marina Sings by Helen Gray Cone
"Marina Sings" by Helen Gray Cone is a poem inspired by Act V, Scene I of Shakespeare's *Pericles*, dramatizing the moment when the young Marina sings to her long-lost father, the broken and grief-stricken king Pericles, aboard his ship anchored in a golden harbor at sunset. The poem opens with a vivid scene-setting: Pericles sits in profound desolation, his gray beard and disheveled hair falling about him like a veil, utterly unresponsive to the world around him. He is a man consumed by years of sorrow, described as being wrapped in ancient pain as though sealed within it, beyond even the capacity for tears or lamentation. The harbor glows with rose and gold in the fading light, the Tyrian curtain billows richly above him, and everything around him suggests the dignity of a king—yet he himself is unreachable, as still and mute as stone. Into this scene comes Marina, young and radiant, who surveys the ruined figure before her with eyes that the poet compares to a tender wing just brushing a bleached wreck lying buried in sand. Marina then sings. Her song is a lullaby addressed to grief itself, personified as a weeping infant who is rocked and soothed by the sea. The sea is presented as a benevolent, murmuring nurse whose spell transforms sorrow: tears become mists of rainbow dreams, and hurt is balmed and bound. Most consoling of all, the song's nurse-voice promises that nothing is truly lost—all the heart's loves, all joys put away, shall be restored on another day. The song is not a denial of suffering but a promise of its eventual transformation, a gentle insistence that what seems gone is only held in safekeeping. Marina herself trembles with the intensity of her singing, described as quivering like a lyre, her eyes burning with azure fire and her hair playing around her brow like the light flames worn by divine beings. She is portrayed as luminously beautiful, almost otherworldly in her purity and ardor. Yet despite the power and sincerity of her singing, Pericles remains unresponsive, sealed within his grief. He gives no sign of having heard her. Recognizing that music alone cannot reach him, Marina ceases to sing and instead speaks softly and directly to him: "Most royal sir." This simple, human address accomplishes what the elaborate beauty of the song could not. Pericles lifts his head and looks at her. The poem uses this moment of sudden awakening to capture the miraculous quality of the scene in Shakespeare's original. The image Cone employs is of a castaway, half dead on a raft, who is woken by an unexpected cool rain against his parched and tearless face, and who then sees standing before him what seems a radiant figure—his love from youth, returned from death. The recognition is described as happy-crazed, a disorienting joy on the border of madness and miracle. Through this comparison, Cone conveys that Pericles's awakening at the sight and sound of Marina is not merely emotional recovery but something closer to resurrection: the return of a man who had, in all meaningful senses, already died inside. The poem as a whole explores the power of art, particularly song, to approach grief, and the ultimately human need for direct contact and recognition that lies beyond what art alone can accomplish. Marina's song is beautiful and true, but it is her presence as a person—her voice speaking his title, her eyes meeting his—that finally penetrates his isolation. Cone frames this not as a failure of music but as a testament to the irreducible power of human connection, suggesting that the deepest wounds are healed not by beauty heard from a distance but by being truly seen and addressed. The lush imagery of sunset, sea, gold, and flame throughout the poem reinforces a sense of the scene as charged with significance, a turning point from death-in-life toward renewed existence.
By Helen Gray Cone · Genre: Poetry, Dramatic Poetry, Literary Fiction