City of Is

The City of Is is the drowned Breton city at the heart of Christabel LaMotte’s poem The Drowned City. Ruled by the sorceress Dahud, it survives beneath the sea as both a legendary place and an alternative imaginative world: one that challenges male-dominated accounts of civilization while withholding a final judgment on the woman at its center.

Legend and Literary Introduction

In a conversation about the Breton legend, Maud Bailey explains that Is was drowned for its wickedness and ruled by Queen Dahud, daughter of King Gradlond. Some versions describe the women of the city as transparent. LaMotte made the legend the subject of a poem, drawing on Breton mythology she had known since childhood.

Roland Michell encounters the poem while Maud is consulting a volume of LaMotte’s work edited by Leonora Stern. The collection, titled Tallahassee Women Poets, presents The Drowned City with Stern’s prefatory note. The poem therefore reaches Roland not as an isolated relic, but through a modern editorial framing that relates its mythic material to women’s writing and cultural history.

Dahud and the Conflict Between Worlds

Stern reads the poem’s conflict as a cultural opposition. Gradlond represents Indo-European patriarchy; Dahud, his sorceress daughter, is associated with a more instinctive, earthy paganism. The city under water becomes a women’s world set against the male-dominated technological and industrial world represented by Paris. The Breton wordplay Par-is makes the opposition visible in the city’s name: Is is imagined as the reverse of Paris, not simply another place on the map.

The legend’s movement between land and water also complicates any straightforward account of liberation. Gradlond makes a liberating leap to dry land at Quimper, while Dahud remains immersed. Is is thus at once a submerged alternative to patriarchal civilization and a world from which its ruler does not emerge. Stern notes that the city is said to surface when Paris is drowned for its sins, turning the legend into an imagined reversal of the dominant city’s fate.

The Poem’s Underwater Imagery

LaMotte’s poem makes submersion a condition of perception as well as setting. Its speaker looks into the silence of drowned Is, where a church spire stands in thickened green. Reflection alters the landscape: trees meet their mirrored selves, and the poem declares that “All things are doubled, and the clear / Thick element is doubled too.” The water does not merely conceal the city; it makes the visible world unstable, doubled, and difficult to read as a single surface.

The poem also figures its inhabitants as preserved and inaccessible. The text evokes things stored inside a glassy box and describes “damned and drowned transparent things” that “Hold silent commerce.” These images join the legend’s transparent women to the city’s underwater enclosure, but they do not explain what the women communicate or what their supposed crimes were. Their silence is part of the poem’s structure, not a gap filled by a definitive account.

Interpretations and Unresolved Meaning

Stern calls attention to LaMotte’s treatment of Dahud’s alleged crimes. Isidore LaMotte, Christabel’s father, labels them “perversions” in his Breton Myths and Legends, without specifying what they were; Christabel likewise does not specify. The omission leaves the charge open to scrutiny: the reader encounters a moral accusation but not the conduct that would supposedly justify it. This restraint prevents the poem’s framing of Dahud from settling into a simple verdict.

The City of Is consequently holds several meanings in tension. It is a Breton myth, a poetic world shaped by childhood knowledge of local tradition, and a counter-image to patriarchal industrial modernity. Its doubled water, enclosed inhabitants, and withheld explanation invite interpretation without reducing the submerged city or Dahud to a fully explained allegory. In the poem, the alternative world is present, but remains partly beyond the reach of those who look into it.