What lies five fathoms deep ?

Question

Where and why ?

Greetings my anglo-saxon friends !

Answer 1

Pearldaisy told you what lies five fathoms deep. (But there are other answers too).

Two fathoms is also important to English literature. Even fewer people will know why.

Answer 2

Five fathoms deep lies William Shakespeare in his coffin.

Answer 3

hi there *z !

Five fathoms deep

The floating dreams of drowned sailors

But twenty five  fathoms deep

The silence of subterranean agony and mirth

Herculine

...and this one to share, " Full Fathom Five" ,by the American poet Sylvia Plath:

"Then you come in with the tide's coming

When seas wash cold, foam-Capped: white hair, white beard, far-flung,

A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves

Crest and trough. Miles longExtend the radial sheaves

Of your spread hair, in which wrinkling skeins

Knotted, caught, survivesThe old myth of orgins

Unimaginable. You float near

As kneeled ice-mountainsOf the north, to be steered clear

Of, not fathomed. All obscurity

Starts with a danger:Your dangers are many. I

Cannot look much but your form suffers

Some strange injuryAnd seems to die: so vapors

Ravel to clearness on the dawn sea.

The muddy rumorsOf your burial move me

To half-believe: your reappearance

Proves rumors shallow,For the archaic trenched lines

Of your grained face shed time in runnels:

Ages beat like rainsOn the unbeaten channels

Of the ocean. Such sage humor and

Durance are whirlpoolsTo make away with the ground-

Work of the earth and the sky's ridgepole.

Waist down, you may windOne labyrinthine tangle

To root deep among knuckles, shinbones,

Skulls. Inscrutable,Below shoulders not once

Seen by any man who kept his head,

You defy questions;You defy godhood.

I walk dry on your kingdom's border

Exiled to no good.Your shelled bed I remember.

Father, this thick air is murderous.

I would breathe water."

Answer 4

Full fathoms five thy father lies

Of his bones are coral made

Those are pearls that were his eyes

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea change

Into something rich and strange