In her book Theatres of Glass, Rebecca Stott writes about the Victorian craze for home aquariums – which swept London in the 1850s, with people taking animals from the seaside and making miniature rock pools at home in large glass enclosures or pie dishes. The craze did not last long; people didn’t have a way to oxygenate the water and most of what they collected died.
But among the people who loved the idea that you could create a rock pool at home was Mary Ann Evans – who wrote as George Eliot. She and her partner, the philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes, spent two summers hunting sea anemones in the town of Ilfracombe, where they were “absolutely fascinated” by what they saw, Stott says. Commenting on how difficult they found it at first to spot the anemones they had been told were as “plenty as blackberries”, Eliot wrote that it is “characteristic enough of the wide difference there is between having eyes and seeing”.
Lewes, meanwhile, wrote in an article for the Westminster Review:
We must always remember the great drama which is incessantly acted out in every drop of water, on every inch of earth. Then and only then do we realise the mighty complexity, the infinite splendour of nature. Then and only then do we feel how full of life, varied, intricate, marvellous, world within world, yet nowhere without space to move is this single planet, on the crust of which we stand and look out into shoreless space peopled by myriads of other planets, larger, if not more wonderful than ours.
Rock pools remind me of putting kids’ party bags together: one or two of a selection of miniature objects dropped into each receptacle. Each one must have a few snails, a little sand, a limpet and at least one sea anemone – soon to be harassed by the fingers of small children. It is probably wrong to touch, even gently, a sea anemone. But even at 35, I find it difficult to resist the feeling of having the mighty complexity of nature realise me back by sticking its tentacles gently to me.
Each rock pool is a household, each animal inside it is its own animal, its own world of nerves and hunger. Philip Larkin, in his poem Best Society, compares the feeling of the infinite, hard-won splendour of being all alone in your house in the rain, to a sea anemone unfolding:
Viciously, then, I lock my door.
The gas-fire breathes. The wind outside
Ushers in evening rain. Once more
Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.
In TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, shortly after he mentions sea anemones – “The river is within us, the sea is all about us; […] The pools where it offers to our curiosity / The more delicate algae and the sea anemone” – arrives the totally absurd line, “The sea howl / And the sea yelp, are different voices”.
Ishion Hutchinson writes of becoming a father:
At nights birds hammered my unborn
child’s heart to strength, each strike bringing
bones and spine to glow, her lungs pestled
loud as the sea I was raised a sea anemone
among women who cursed their hearts
out,
Hyejung Kook writes of growing peonies and being “still childless”: “Arrow-like / as they emerge from the earth, the just unfurling leaves / look like fingers, reminiscent of intestinal villi and sea anemones, / moving with unexpected purpose.”
I have pronounced their name incorrectly most of my life – “anenome” – and when I type it, I type it wrong. Like a finger poking at me, autocorrect makes the letters move with unexpected purpose into the right order, whether I want them to or not. My daughter calls them enemies or, like me, anenomies. I’ve taught her so much; and this I got wrong.
On Sunday at the beach, she took my hand and led me to where she knows the crabs live. She knows that I will do almost any activity, especially one I have done a hundred times, if she lets us hold hands while we do it. It is like having an anemone wrap around your finger: the gentlest grasp you can imagine, and unmistakable. On the way we looked at rock pools, and she said, “I like looking at anenomies.” I’m not sure what we learn about the world, or anemones, by the poetry written about them. But I do know that I feel the same way she does. I like looking at anemones, too.
Helen Sullivan is a Guardian journalist. She is writing a book for Scribner Australia
Do you have an animal, insect or other subject you’d like to see profiled by this columnist? Email helen.sullivan@theguardian.com
