Borders and their metaphors: traversing coastal boundaries

For the first few days I have been walking through the edges of countries. Towards the end of my walk to Dover, exhausted, I noticed the land begin to drop away. The horizon became craggy and then sea.

Descending into the town I passed Dover Castle – a vast structure that was often called ‘the Key to Britain’. Militarily speaking, that is. More extraordinary than the castle is the cliffs. They are as spectacular as they are iconic. I had only seen pictures of Beachy Head before but the cliffs extend much further, sharply tumbling to the sea and dominating the landscape for miles.

During his first invasion of Britain, Julius Caesar was deterred by landing at Dover port due to the native armies amassing on the cliff edge. The Romans were within distance of their javelins and had to find an alternative site of disembarkation.

The Cliffs of Dover stand as a metaphor for the English border in general; their geographical span is far exceeded in the imagination. In the works of Shakespeare there are two comparable speeches which describes the topography of England/the British Isles (a contentious slash mark). The more famous is John of Gaunt’s ‘Sceptred Isle’ speech. It is used frequently as a statement of fervent patriotism.

At first, we see the sea as a positive defensive mechanism:

This precious stone set in a silver sea
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,

However, the second half of the speech goes sour as John recounts the harm done by Richard II’s rule. The image transforms:

England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,

The sea encloses England. It is isolated. And in this instance, isolated in shame.

Shakespeare revisited the idea in one of his last plays: Cymbeline. This time the words are put into the mouth of the Queen, a character who is essentially a caricature of an evil stepmother. She says,

Remember, sir, my liege,
The kings your ancestors, together with
The natural bravery of your isle, which stands
As Neptune’s park, ribbed and paled in
With rocks unscalable and roaring waters,
With sands that will not bear your enemies’ boats,
But suck them up to the topmast.

The plot is quite strange but she is trying to persuade the King (Cymbeline) to not pay tribute to the Roman state. He decides not to, chaos ensues and  the Romans invade Wales. Eventually, Jupiter arrives on an eagle and everything is resolved with Cymbeline paying the tribute. If you haven’t read it, I promise it’s strange as it sounds.

What’s important, though, is that narrative of isolationist nationalism is put in the mouth of a parodically evil character. At the end of his career, Shakespeare takes a second look at the idea of the proud island nation and thinks again.

Even then, the lines drawn in John of Gaunt’s speech aren’t all that clear. In the reign of Richard II, the border of England wasn’t at the cliffs. Calais and the surrounding area was very much considered part of England. It was referred to as “the jewel of the English crown” and its representatives sat in parliament. It wasn’t recaptured by the French until 1558. Six years later, Shakespeare was born.

Along with history we might think about geography and geology: walking from Tourneham-sur-la-hem to Wisques, about 50km in from the coast, the farm land was fairly indistinguishable from that of the North Downs Way. The same flinty stone with a blueish, almost ceramic quality adorned the paths in between the fields in both places.

Walking through Guînes I saw posters for Le Front National. In the right hand image, France (described by its borders) is being crushed by the consequences of immigration. For the 2015 election, UKIP released a billboard which depicted an escalator running up the Cliffs of Dover with the slogan ‘No border. No control.’

Walking along the beach from Calais to Wissant I would pass pillboxes at regular intervals. Concrete ghosts Second World War. Similar pillboxes are found in Dover and some have fallen off the receding coastline in Essex. They are a memory of the hardest border. Although, I think all borders echo that sense of violence.

There are metaphors and symbols that can become full with dangerous emotion and feeling. These signs become overburdened and topple (or are pushed) into a single-minded and aggressive pattern of thought.

Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ is a famously miserable poem but to me there’s something about this last bit that doesn’t seem utterly depressing. I think it might be the double usage of ‘love’. For me, it puts a hole in the poem that is big enough to sink (or submerge) the misery.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The poem has very little to do with the Dover metaphor I have been describing. It’s more about the sea/land border as metaphor for unrequited romance. Possibly about the impossibility of their union, about their forever nearly being together. However, at its end I think Arnold goes a bit prophetic. There is a lot to be said for those final three lines in the internet age. A lot to be said about them in relation to national identity and the surrounding politics.

Finally, I want to share this song by Vera Lynn. Its pastoral and its sentimental but I find it quite moving. There is a belief in transfiguration of metaphor. The frontier, the defensive line can become a symbol of peace: