The Lake of the Dismal Swamp
“They made her a grave too cold and damp
For a soul so warm and true;
And she’s gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp,
Where all night long, by a firefly lamp,
She paddles her white canoe.”
– Thomas Moore
When a friend says he cannot attend the office holiday party because he’s “swamped at work,” he means he’s very busy and has a lot to do. Idioms like, “bogged down” and “swamped” come from people’s experiences with getting physically stuck in bogs and swamps. The metaphor has carried over into urban office talk, even though some of us don’t work in the field and don’t have wet feet. http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/get+bogged+down
As with any great metaphor, there’s a deeper meaning associated with the images of the swamp: slimy water, stinky undergrowth and roots slither like snakes through American literature. David Miller’sDark Eden: The Swamp in 19th Century American Culture provides a wide-sweeping study of the swamp metaphor in American literature. He writes, “swamps were symbols of female nature, of social crises, especially slavery, in the work of Stowe, Simms, Church, Heade, Strother, Tuckerman, Lanier, and others.” He gives examples of the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia in the 1850s and the ways in which wetland areas created creepy moods in popular fiction, such as Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in which the narrator must travel across swampy country and past a gloomy tarn. The tarn, a dark lake that surrounds the House of Usher, reflects his narcissism and negativity. It’s not a pretty picture. http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Eden-Nineteenth-Century-Cambridge-Literature/dp/0521375533/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1291327363&sr=1-3
A dark swamp at night can serve as a good metaphor for the mysteries of life, a problem or crisis that a protagonist might have to solve, or possibly, represent evil. But why? Just as the sea used to symbolize great danger and perils in art and literature, so have swamps stood for darkness, disease, destruction of the soul and the devil. A popular video game has a level called, “The Swamp of Evil,” and American television shows have often portrayed swamps as places where bad things happen, to the extent that audiences can predict the danger, usually set to ominous music. Perhaps this is why there are so many horror films that set their stories in swamps. In the same vein, Strange Wetlands’ totem hero, Swampthing, often solved environmental crimes that took place in the Florida Everglades. http://aswm.org/wordpress/strange-wetlands-ode-to-swampthing/
By contrast, moorlands, a type of habitat in temperate grasslands, comes from the Old English word, mor, meaning low-lying wetlands, which were found throughout Southwestern England but also found in tropical parts of Africa, North Australia, Central Asia and North America. Biodiversity in moorlands is very rich. Moorland and tundra constantly shift their boundaries and the distance between them with climate change. Two of my favorite novels took place in moorlands:Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte and The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett both carried their protagonists through the moorlands they loved. Bronte and Burnett, as well as many British authors, treated the moor with affection; it was a place their protagonists loved, a retreat for secret rendezvous for lovers, a place to roam, escape and contemplate. Moorlands are misty, wild places of mystery. Dreamy and poetic.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moorland For poems and other examples of literature that take place in moors, go to: http://www.squidoo.com/manymoors#module109786541
Speak of the North!
~by Charlotte Bronte
Speak of the North! A lonely moor
Silent and dark and tractless swells,
The waves of some wild streamlet pour
Hurriedly through its ferny dells.
Profoundly still the twilight air,
Lifeless the landscape; so we deem
Till like a phantom gliding near
A stag bends down to drink the stream.
And far away a mountain zone,
A cold, white waste of snow-drifts lies,
And one star, large and soft and lone,
Silently lights the unclouded skies.
Strange Wetlands™ 