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Copywork
About This Passage
This is the chapter’s great set-piece of the sublime, and its rhetorical hinge. Three long, accreting sentences build the barrier of ice the way a navigator would meet it — first the ‘immense frozen expanse’ filling the whole horizon, then its ‘ragged and broken’ edge ‘utterly impassable,’ then the eye carried back to ‘gigantic ranges of ice-mountains, the one towering above the other.’ Notice how the syntax itself climbs, clause stacked on clause, until the prose seems as towering as the ice. Then the short final sentence delivers the inference that the whole chapter will dispute: Cook ‘concluded that this vast field reached the southern pole or was joined to a continent.’ Copying it trains the eye to see how Poe makes description do argumentative work — the sublime barrier is also the premise Reynolds, Morrell, and the narrator will all push against — and how a periodic build can earn a flat, momentous conclusion.
In latitude 71° 10’, longitude 106° 54’ W., the navigators were stopped, as before, by an immense frozen expanse, which filled the whole area of the southern horizon. The northern edge of this expanse...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Retell this chapter in order, attending to its unusual structure: how Captain Guy, on word received at Tristan da Cunha, abandons the planned route up Patagonia and turns the Jane south; how the narrator then suspends his own story to deliver a documentary survey of every prior attempt on the pole — Cook twice walled off by impassable ice, Weddel reaching the farthest south yet denying any polar land, Morrell astonished by warmer water and an open sea beyond the sixty-fifth degree, and Briscoe sighting and claiming new land while Reynolds disputes the experts; and how the chapter closes by returning to the Jane, poised before nearly three hundred unexplored degrees, with the narrator vowing his own experience will settle the matter. Pause where the survey most sharply contradicts itself and explain why Poe might want that contradiction.
Discussion Questions
- Poe interrupts his adventure narrative to perform an elaborate scholarly survey — dates, latitudes, quoted journals, and dueling authorities like Reynolds and the Royal Geographical Society. What might Poe accomplish, rhetorically, by suspending the story to stage this much documentary apparatus, and why place it on the very threshold of the unknown? Use details from the chapter.
- Weddel pressed farther south than any navigator yet 'discourages the idea of land,' while Cook concluded the ice he met 'reached the southern pole or was joined to a continent' — opposite verdicts drawn from comparable evidence. What might this chapter be suggesting about the limits of eyewitness authority before an unmapped world, and why? Use details from the chapter.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
To force a way into or through something difficult or resistant.
Item 2
To anticipate something with unease; also, to grasp or understand.
Item 3
Outweighing all other considerations; decisive.
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Critical Thinking
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