“Which freely flowed to meet our thirsts, be sealed”

The line “Which freely flowed to meet our thirsts, be sealed?” is a repeated poetic question through which Maud Bailey and Roland Michell discover a possible connection between Randolph Henry Ash’s Ask to Embla and his poem Melusina. Its wording moves from the image of freely available water to the threat of closure; in Melusina, the repeated line acquires a domestic and relational force through the surrounding image of the hearth. The echo prompts a hypothesis about the poems’ relationship, but the characters do not settle its direction or date in this conversation.

The Echo in Ask to Embla

Maud and Roland are discussing a theory about water and fountains in Ash’s poetry after 1860. Roland describes an elemental pattern in which water, stones, earth, and air mingle with different kinds of source material: geysers associated with Lyell, Norse myth, Greek mythical fountains, and Yorkshire waterfalls. He also wonders about the Fountain of Thirst in Melusina. The discussion frames the recurring line not as an isolated verbal coincidence but as a possible part of Ash’s larger poetic treatment of water and myth.

Roland then reads a passage from Ask to Embla. It begins with drinking from the Fountain of Vaucluse and describes a northern force stirring a still pool; the passage culminates in the question “Which freely flowed to meet our thirsts, be sealed?” The movement from drinking and stirring to the image of a fountain sealed makes water at once a source of renewal and something that can be withheld. Asked to repeat the lines, Roland does so, turning the phrase into the audible object of their shared attention.

The Melusina Parallel

Maud recognizes the same closing words in another passage. In Melusina, Raimondin speaks after being told that he has looked at Mélusine in her marble bath and broken the prohibition. He acknowledges betrayal and asks whether there is any remedy and whether the two must part. The passage then repeats the question about the fountains that had flowed to meet their thirsts. Here the line is embedded in a crisis of trust and possible separation: the shared water belongs to a relationship whose continuity is suddenly in doubt.

The parallel is sharpened by the line immediately preceding the repeated question: “Shall our hearth’s ash grow pale.” Roland isolates that image aloud, and Maud connects the hearth with Melusina’s role as builder of castles and homes. The repeated fountain image therefore sits beside a domestic emblem. Together, hearth and water make the threatened loss more than an abstract change in poetic imagery: the question invokes the possible fading of home and the sealing off of what had once been shared.

A Clue Without a Settled Answer

The echo gives Maud and Roland grounds to suspect a deliberate relationship between the poems. Maud observes that the line reads like a classic literary clue and suggests that Ash’s poetry may offer evidence about the poems’ connection. Yet she also stresses that there are problems with dating Ask to Embla, which she and Roland are working to resolve. Their exchange poses the question of whether Ash’s line in one poem precedes or answers its counterpart in the other, but does not establish which came first.

Maud’s remark that Christabel LaMotte was clever and given to hinting connects the interpretive puzzle to the characters’ larger investigation of concealed literary evidence. She points to the dolls, while the discussion turns to how critics can become detectives, seeking an origin and a secret in texts. The repeated phrase works in precisely this double register: it is a poetic echo that invites close comparison, and a clue whose implications remain conditional until the dating evidence can support a conclusion.

Meaning of the Refrain

The line’s question form preserves rather than resolves its tension. “Freely flowed” evokes a source that met thirst without restriction; “be sealed” imagines that access ending. In Ask to Embla, the question follows the passage’s movement through drinking and the stirring of a still pool. In Melusina, it follows the confession of betrayal and the prospect of parting. The same words thus carry different immediate circumstances while linking elemental renewal to emotional and domestic continuity.

That recurrence does not by itself prove which poem borrowed from the other, or when either passage was written. Its significance lies instead in how it makes the two passages legible beside one another: water becomes a shared poetic figure for what sustains desire and what may be lost, while the altered surroundings redirect the figure from a fountain’s movement toward a threatened hearth and relationship. The unresolved chronology is part of the clue’s force, holding interpretation open without making every proposed answer equally certain.