SOURCE: '"Words cannot knytt': Language and Desire in Ralegh's The Ocean to Cynthia," in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 27, No. 1, Winter, 1987, pp. 35-51.

In the following essay, Stillman emphasizes the connection in The Ocean to Cynthia between Raleigh's loss of Elizabeth I's favor and the inadequacy of language—specifically, the symbolic mode formerly used by Raleigh to represent the Queen's cultic status as a beloved deity—to express his suffering.

Every mode of thought is bestowed on us, like a gift, with some new principle of symbolic expression. It has a logical development, which is simply the exploitation of all the uses to which that symbolism lends itself; and when these uses are exhausted, the mental activity in question has found its limit. Either it serves its purpose and becomes truistic, like our orientation in 'Euclidean space' or our appreciation of objects and their accidents (on...