Sirens

Sirens in Possession embody the perilous power of song and desire, but they also help Christabel LaMotte articulate the instability of language and identity. They appear both as figures in Randolph Henry Ash’s Yorkshire experience and as members of a changing mythic kinship through which LaMotte describes herself: alluring, divided among languages, and wary of the consuming force of another person’s attention.

Song, Desire, and Mortality

In a poem about mythic female figures, the siren’s song is an unceasing act of address. Virtuous men bind their ears and eyes and sail away, not simply to resist temptation but to escape the pain of loving what must die. The poem makes the siren’s desire beautiful in song yet mortal in the kiss: the attraction carries a cost that the departing sailors seek to avoid. The image therefore holds seduction and grief together, making the siren at once a source of danger and a figure whose own pain is bound up with the mortality of what she loves.

This tension gives the siren a more complex place than a simple emblem of temptation. The poem’s men protect themselves by turning away, while the siren continues to sing. Her power is expressed through the very art that exposes her to loss. Desire does not overcome mortality; it brings the knowledge of mortality into the song. The image is thus both a warning about surrender and a lament for the beloved’s inevitable disappearance.

A Figure in Ash’s Yorkshire Journey

During the Yorkshire days with Christabel LaMotte, Ash compares her singing on Filey Brigg to that of the sirens in Goethe and Homer. The comparison is set amid a landscape marked by danger: Filey Brigg is the place where Mrs Peabody and her family had been swept away. LaMotte sings from the rocks, bringing the classical image into a specific coastal setting where beauty and peril coexist.

The episode belongs to a broader portrait of the pair’s days together. LaMotte helps prepare Ash’s specimens and climbs over rocks to obtain them; she crosses the moors and watches an old woman cook by a turf fire. Ash, meanwhile, draws out stories and information from the people they meet. After seeing him sustain a long conversation with a countryman, LaMotte says that he is in love with all humanity. Ash answers that his love is for her and, by extension, for all creatures, because he believes them part of a divine organism. Their exchange clarifies the difference between them: he describes an expansive attention that finds life everywhere, while she calls herself mortal and fears being held too long in his “hot light.” The siren comparison resonates with this unequal force of attraction, though the scene does not reduce LaMotte to a mythic type.

LaMotte’s Shifting Languages

In Sabine de Kercoz’s account, LaMotte uses the Fairy Mélusine, the Sirens, and the Mermaids to explain why she has been unable to write since arriving in Brittany. She does not know which language to think in, she says, and feels herself shifting shape along with her thoughts. The mythic figures give form to a linguistic condition: LaMotte is half-French and half-English, with Breton and Celtic identities behind both languages.

Her difficulty is not merely a lack of fluency. LaMotte distinguishes among the sources and textures of her languages. Her desire to write came from her father, but the language she calls her mother tongue is her mother’s, associated with household minutiae and women’s fashion rather than spirituality. English, her first language, seems to her made of separate blocks, solid objects, and matters of fact. Her father taught her English first, then French, and she later learned Breton. To invoke the Sirens alongside Mélusine and the Mermaids is to describe a self that cannot be securely housed in a single language or settled identity.

Myth as a Form of Self-Description

The Sirens recur across the novel in different registers: as singers in a poetic meditation on desire and death, as a classical comparison for LaMotte’s singing on the Yorkshire coast, and as one element in her account of multilingual, shifting identity. These appearances do not establish a literal supernatural presence. Instead, myth supplies a vocabulary with which the characters and the poem can approach experiences that ordinary description cannot contain: attraction shadowed by loss, the danger of being overwhelmed by another’s attention, and the difficulty of making a coherent self in more than one language.

The different uses of the figure retain a productive contradiction. In the poem, the siren’s song draws listeners toward a mortal danger, yet her own desire is also painful. In the Yorkshire scene, the comparison makes LaMotte’s voice part of a landscape where beauty is inseparable from risk. In Sabine’s narrative, the Sirens are not primarily threats to others but companions in a metaphor for LaMotte’s own linguistic doubleness. The myth therefore shifts from an image of dangerous seduction to a means of self-understanding, without losing its association with longing and vulnerability.