Of whales and men: Caitríona O’Reilly’s septentrional voyage in “The Sea Cabinet” (2006)

International audienceThe title-poem of Caitríona O’Reilly’s second collection – The Sea Cabinet – is a sequence of five ekphrastic pieces paying tribute to the city of Hull’s past as a major whaling port. As she perambulates through the galleries of the Maritime Museum, the Irish poetess is inspired by all the paraphernalia on display: skeletons of various species of whales, whaler’s tools but also journals, logbooks, paintings, illustrations and hundreds of examples of the folk art and mythemes of the whaler. From one poem to the next, O’Reilly depicts the northernness of the Arctic Ocean as eery but bewitching otherness, focusing on illustrations of Captain Graville’s whaling ship ice-trapped in Greenlandic waters, on an aquatic curio and nineteenth century headcasts of Eskimos, not to mention evocations of the mythical narwhal or “sea unicorn”, the white beluga and the sperm whale. Explicit allusions to Melville’s Moby Dick, Hugh MacDiarmid and the Islamic tradition according to which the earth is carried on a whale’s back introduce side literary paradigms, expanding and complexifying O’Reilly’s vivid tableau of Northern waters and their conquest.This paper proposes to examine how O’Reilly balances the wonders and dangers of the Arctic, its ambivalence and that of its conquerors in her poetic polyptych. It thus aims to explore her interest in icy wilderness harbouring extraordinary marine biodiversity; civilization and progress navigating through territories at the edge of, or beyond, culture; adventure and heroism vitiated by covetousness and forgery; conquest fascinated by, but ultimately suppressing, alterity