A. Sklyarenko:
"...she [Aqua] saw giant flying sharks with lateral eyes
taking barely one night to carry pilgrims through
black ether across an entire continent from dark to shining sea, before booming back to Seattle or
Wark. (1.3)"
Jansy Mello:
The complete set of lines of the patriotic song "America, the
Beautiful" not only carries "from sea to shining sea" (which I always
connected to VN's "dark to shining sea") but also a reference to "pilgrim
feet... a thoroughfare of freedom beat"*
excerpt:
".............................
America! America!
God shed his grace on
thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
O
beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassioned stress
A thoroughfare
of freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
................................"
Wikipedia, from where I copied the 1913 version of
Katherine Lee's lyrics, also informs: "From sea to shining sea", originally used
in the charters of some of the English Colonies in North America, is an American
idiom meaning from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean (or vice versa)....A
term similar to this is the Canadian motto A Mari Usque Ad Mare ("From
sea to sea.")]
btw: There is a reference to Cortez in Pale
Fire (in the lines about "Chapman's homer", indicating John Keats's
poem ) when, through him, the poet's imagination carries him over
to reach the Pacific Ocean, unlike the geography of Homer's travels
which, I think, were limited to the Atlantic - a poetic feat that dispenses
telescopes, ships and airplanes...
| MUCH have I travell’d in the realms of
gold, |
|
| And many goodly states and kingdoms
seen; |
|
| Round many western islands have I
been |
|
| Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. |
|
| Oft of one wide expanse had I been told |
|
| That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his
demesne; |
|
| Yet did I never breathe its pure
serene |
|
| Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: |
|
| Then felt I like some watcher of the skies |
|
| When a new planet swims into his
ken; |
|
| Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes |
|
| He star’d at the Pacific—and all his
men |
|
| Look’d at each other with a wild surmise— |
|
|
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
(On First Looking into Chapman's Homer) |
|
| |
.........................................................................................................................................................................................
* I checked BB's Ada Online but found no reference to
this song. 21.17: through black ether:
a concept of nineteenth-century physics in the midst of these visions of
twentieth-century technology.
21.18-19: back to Seattle or Wark: Seattle,
Washington, and not Wark,
a village in Northumberland on the Scottish border, but a version of Newark, New
Jersey--the western and eastern coasts of the United States, therefore--with a
bizarre echo of "back to . . . work." The "New" of the real Newark is eliminated
here, as if to compensate for Ada's
adding a "New Cheshire" to the United States or matching the suppression of the
name of New York for "Manhattan." MOTIF: transatlantic doubling.