Shelley’s rendering of these lines from Vergil pulls us into the moment a hero steps into a liquid abyss. The sea parts like a mountain cleft to receive Aristaeus, who descends through his mother Cyrene’s untouched freshwater kingdom. You feel his disorientation right away — he’s “half ’wildered” by the motion of the deep, moving through sacred groves no human foot has ever brushed, past marble caves and lakes that need no rain. The poem’s tone is one of reverent bewilderment. As the young man walks, Vergil (and Shelley after him) unrolls a cascade of ancient river names — Phasis, Lycus, Enipeus, Tyber, Eridanus — each carrying a mythic charge, each roaring up from the underworld with a fierce energy that breaks onto the “purple brine.” The mood isn’t frightening, but it is sublime: a private, echoing world where a mortal is simultaneously privileged and overwhelmed, moving through a dreamlike space that exists forever beyond our normal reach.
From Vergil's Fourth Georgic — Summary
[VERSES 360 ET SEQ.]
And the cloven waters like a chasm of mountains Stood, and received him in its mighty portal And led him through the deep's untrampled fountains
He went in wonder through the path immortal Of his great Mother and her humid reign And groves profaned not by the step of mortal
Which sounded as he passed, and lakes which rain Replenished not girt round by marble caves 'Wildered by the watery motion of the main
Half 'wildered he beheld the bursting waves Of every stream beneath the mighty earth Phasis and Lycus which the ... sand paves,
The chasm where old Enipeus has its birth And father Tyber and Anienas[?] glow And whence Caicus, Mysian stream, comes forth
And rock-resounding Hypanis, and thou Eridanus who bearest like empire's sign Two golden horns upon thy taurine brow
Thou than whom none of the streams divine Through garden-fields and meads with fiercer power, Burst in their tumult on the purple brine