Full Fathom Five by William Shakespeare
Quick answer: Full Fathom Five from The Tempest, analysed: Ariel's song explained line by line, the meaning of sea-change, and what poets can steal from its strange music.
Nine lines of song gave English the phrase 'sea-change' and one of its most haunting pictures of death. In the first act of The Tempest, the spirit Ariel sings Full Fathom Five to Ferdinand, who has just survived a shipwreck and believes his father drowned. The song tells him his father lies five fathoms down, his bones turned to coral, his eyes to pearls.
It is a consolation built on a lie, since the father is alive, and yet it consoles four centuries of readers who know better. The song's claim is that the sea does not destroy the dead but remakes them into 'something rich and strange', and that idea has proved one of the most generative in all of poetry.
The poem
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
William Shakespeare, 'Full Fathom Five' from The Tempest (published 1623)
What the poem says
The song is addressed to a grieving son. Your father lies five fathoms deep, it says, about nine metres down, and then it performs the transformation: his bones are now coral, his eyes are pearls. Nothing of him fades away; everything undergoes a change worked by the sea into treasure.
The closing lines add sound to the picture: sea-nymphs ring his knell hourly, and the burden of the song imitates the bell itself, ding-dong. A funeral bell rung underwater by nymphs is grief made beautiful, and the listening Ferdinand says the ditty remembers his drowned father. The song does not deny the death; it re-describes it until it can be borne.
How it works
The metre is trochaic and chant-like, stresses falling first, which gives the song its spell quality; this is not conversation but incantation. The rhymes arrive in close pairs, sealing each image as it forms, and the onomatopoeic burden turns the poem into the bell it describes.
The central device is transformation imagery handled with strict logic: each body part maps to a marine treasure of similar shape and colour, bones to white coral, eyes to lustrous pearls. The compression is absolute; there is no explanation, only exchange. And the key word is 'suffer', the dead man suffers a sea-change, carrying both meanings at once: he undergoes it, and there is pain in it. That double sense keeps the beauty honest.
Why it lasts
Full Fathom Five lasts because it offers the most compact myth of transformation in the language: loss as metamorphosis rather than erasure. Eliot lifted its imagery into The Waste Land, Plath titled a poem after it, Jackson Pollock named a painting for it, and 'sea-change' now describes any profound alteration, its origin half-forgotten.
It also endures as pure sound. Alliteration, chiming rhyme and bell-echo make it one of the few poems that works on listeners who ignore every word of its meaning, which is fitting for a song sung by a spirit to a man half out of his mind with grief.
What today's poet can steal
Steal the transformation catalogue. Take what was lost and convert it, item by item, into something the new element values: bones to coral, eyes to pearls. The technique works for any loss, a house, a language, a marriage, and forces you into concrete nouns. Judges who score imagery and language, as Writory's do, respond to exactly this kind of specific, worked metaphor.
Steal also the double-edged verb. One word like 'suffer', holding pain and process together, can keep a beautiful poem from going soft. Audit your drafts for the verb that carries two truths at once.
What poets can take from this
- Convert each lost thing into a treasure its new element would make of it.
- Use trochaic, stress-first lines when you want incantation rather than speech.
- Choose one verb that carries pain and process simultaneously.
- Let a sound effect (a bell, a knock, a tide) structure the whole poem.
- Keep transformations logical: match shape, colour or function across the exchange.
- Say 'nothing fades' only after you have shown exactly what changed.
Try it yourself
Write a nine-line song telling a mourner what the lost person or thing has become, converting at least three specific parts into treasures of a new element: sea, soil, fire or sky.
Questions
What does Full Fathom Five mean?
The title means five fathoms deep, about nine metres of water. In the song, Ariel tells Ferdinand his drowned father lies at that depth, transformed by the sea into coral and pearl rather than destroyed.
Where does the phrase 'sea-change' come from?
It was coined in this song, where the drowned man suffers 'a sea-change into something rich and strange'. It now means any profound transformation.
Is the father in Full Fathom Five actually dead?
No. In The Tempest, Ferdinand's father Alonso has survived the shipwreck. Ariel's song is a beautiful fiction, which is part of its fascination: it consoles truly while reporting falsely.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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