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Updated: June 7, 2025
The aspect of the place was so charming and delightful to Clive: the beautiful sea stretched before his eyes when waking, Capri a fairy island in the distance, in the amethyst rocks of which Sirens might be playing that fair line of cities skirting the shore glittering white along the purple water over the whole brilliant scene Vesuvius rising with cloudlets playing round its summit, and the country bursting out into that glorious vegetation with which sumptuous nature decorates every spring this city and scene of Naples were so much to Clive's liking that I have a letter from him dated a couple of days after the young man's arrival, in which he announces his intention of staying there for ever, and gives me an invitation to some fine lodgings in a certain palazzo, on which he has cast his eye.
But there was no sense at all in a peasant lad's standing listening in the morning to the girls milking the cows and thinking thus: they're milking, listen now; 'tis almost by way of something wonderful to hear, a kind of song in nothing but little streams, different from the brass bands in the town and the Salvation Army and the steamer sirens. Music streaming into a pail....
But a lady here, herself one of the entranced, tells me that whoever climbs the hills behind Sorrento, and looks upon the Isle of the Sirens, is struck with an inability to form a desire to depart from these coasts.
When the sun sank and darkness came on, my men went to lie by the hawsers of the ship. Then Circe the Enchantress took my hand, and, making me sit down by her, told me of the voyage that was before us. "To the Sirens first you shall come," said she, "to the Sirens, who sit in their field of flowers and bewitch all men who come near them.
The blasting shriek of the sirens had not alarmed the great company of the Titanic, because such steam calls are an incident of travel in seas where fogs roll. Many had gone to bed, but the hour, 11.40 P. M., was not too late for the friendly contact of saloons and smoking rooms.
Now very soon they came to the Sirens who sing so sweetly that they lure to death every man who listens. For straightway he is mad to be with them where they sing; and alas for the man that would fly without wings! But when the ship drew near the Sirens' island, Odysseus did as Circe had taught him. He bade all his shipmates stop up their ears with moulded wax, so that they could not hear.
Fights broke out among members of groups which had come to stage demonstrations against extraterrestrials. The fighting spread to individuals. Police-car sirens wailed. Squad-cars came careening out of uptown-traffic streets and converged on the tumult. The sirens produced violent surgings of the crowd.
He lingered longest in Italy, but he said his conscience accused him of yielding to the sirens; and he declared that his life was running uselessly away. At last he came to England. He was charmed with everything, and the climate was even kinder to him than that of Italy. He went to all the famous places, and saw many of the famous Englishmen, and wrote that he felt England to be his home.
Morality is the corrector of these false valuatiens; it discriminates for us between real and counterfeit goods, teaches us to discount the pictures of our imagination and see the gnawed bones on the beach where the sirens sing. Our impulses often clash.
If you have watched at sea an island shape, and pass, forlorn in the waste, apparently lifeless, and with no movement to be seen but the silent fountains of the combers, then you know where the Sirens were born, and why awful shapes grew in the minds of the simple Greeks out of the wonders in Crete devised by the wise and mysterious Minoans, who took yearly the tribute of Greek youth youth which never returned to tell.
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