‘”Why were you silent when I spoke tonight?”: coming to terms in Tennyson’s “Sea Dreams” and Swinburne’s A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems.’

The Victorian seaside is registered in both popular culture and literature of the sublime as a liminal space. This cultural function is enabled partly by its status as a symbol of modernity, inflected by the past. Specifically the seaside carries the weight of place-based temporalities, where ‘timelessness’ both underpins and conflicts with holiday time. Along the shore the fashionable water cure for invalids competes with a space that is also coded as healthy freedom. Allegorical seascapes are the ideal vehicle for exploring difficult religious questions, because they are embedded in conflicted ways of seeing. Tennyson’s ‘Sea Dreams’ and Swinburne’s A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems configure a seaside infiltrated by commerce and destabilised by erosion, where meaning is elusive and finally deferred.