Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 30 -- Down to a Sunless Sea
There can be no doubt that Coleridge, familiar as he was with the Neoplatonists, had this
symbolism in mind when he wrote of his river, descending from a Paradisical world, through
caverns, to a "sunless sea" -- sunless because this is a world of spiritual darkness.
From The Winter of Our Discontent (1961) by John Steinbeck,
I just know when a man is looking for me, or some other Margie.
Watch the stairs, they're narrow. Don't hit your head at the top.
Now, here's the switch -- you see? A pleasure dome, soft lights,
smell of musk -- DOWN TO A SUNLESS SEA.
Juxtaposition (1963) by Piers Anthony is fantasy fiction.
He went on DOWN TO A SUNLESS SEA and huddled in the diminishing current as the last of
the water drained out the bottom. Maybe the enchantress, whoever she was, really did mean
to help him, since she knew he would die if she didn't.
Kathleen Raine's "Blake's Debt to Antiquity," Sewanee Review 71:3, Summer 1963, is literary
criticism.
From the secret depths, water perpetually flows, and, like
Alph, the sacred river, runs
Through caverns measureless to man,
DOWN TO A SUNLESS SEA of matter:
sunless because remote from spiritual light and, as Blake shows it, storm-tossed.
Colleen McCullough's A Creed for the Third Millennium (1986) may be forgotten in a much
shorter period, but there's still the nod to Coleridge,
A political appointee, he came with the a new President, was never a career public servant
himself, and went through a predictable sequence from new broom to worn-out stubble -- if he
lasted in the job. Well, Harold Magnus had lasted, and lasted for the usual reason; he
possessed the good sense to let his career people get on with their jobs, and on the whole was
secure enough within himself not to be causelessly obstructive.
"DOWN TO A SUNLESS SEA," she said into the speaker buried in the outside wall.
The door clicked and swung open. Crap. Useless shit. No one in the world could have
duplicated her voice well enough to fool the electronics analyzing it, so why have a changing
password?
From To Blight with Plague: Studies in a Literary Theme (1993) by Barbara Leavy,
But if Poe's works create fable in the mind, as Dayan convincingly argues, then the most
important lines in Coleridge's poems are not those that Poe draws on for his own landscapes of
the mind, but rather the destination of Coleridge's waterway:
The sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
DOWN TO A SUNLESS SEA.
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