The parallels between the shimmering sea-funerals of Simon in Lord of the Flies and that of the sailor in The Tempest are probably well-known; Golding, himself an English teacher, likely drew deliberately from the play. Simon, tended to by 'inquisitive bright creatures,' has his hair 'dressed... with brightness' by the water, his cheek 'silvered' and his shoulder turned to 'sculptured marble'; a miracle Shakespeare terms in The Tempest, a 'sea-change,' when describing how a dead sailor is turned 'into something rich and strange,' his bones turning to coral and his eyes to pearls while 'sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.'
But I'd also like to pick out something less obvious for comparison- what I consider to be the finest lines Dylan Thomas ever wrote. The closing benediction of his poem Where Once the Waters of Your Face is full of a kind of otherworldly love and conviction about immortality; I read it now in a thundering, now in a hushed voice, but never without feeling a swell of awe:
'Dry as a tomb, your coloured lids
Shall not be latched while magic glides
Sage on the earth and sky;
There shall be corals in your beds,
There shall be serpents in your tides,
Till all our sea-faiths die.'
This is a master craftsman at work. The blessing is touching not so much because of the warmth of its repeated imperatives, but because of the chiaroscuro effect- a brilliantly coloured celebration of immortality tinged by notions of death and much absurdity. The 'tomb' comparison is a straw man, thrown in just before we launch into the brightly-hued life of 'coloured lids,' 'corals' and 'tides'- a life so blessed, the sceptre of death raised in the last line seems an impossibility. The benediction's own weirdness adds to the effectiveness- wholehearted positivity would have lost the poem. Apart from the dark undertone added by the 'serpents' (et in arcadia ego?), it's interesting to note we're unsure who or what exactly is the subject- a person who's merged with the sea? Or is it a metaphor? In any case, the surrealism works beautifully.
This verse finds an echo in a better-known Thomas poem, And Death Shall Have No Dominion. There, too, Dylan celebrates, and confidently predicts, immortality. There, too, he bejewels the blessing with light imagery ('They shall have stars at elbow and foot') and invocations of the sea ('Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again' and ''Under the windings of the sea/They lying long shall not die windily;'). Of the two, though, I think I prefer the mysterious efficiency of the former poem.
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