Hopkins's failure to solve the rhetorical problems caused by
narrative distances makes "The Loss of the Eurydice" a failed
poem, for after the reader has been led to sympathize with the
drowned men and boys, he finds himself jarred when the poet
turns back and makes them guilty victims. In contrast,
Lautréamont's Les Chants de Maldoror, which strives to shock the
reader, capitalizes upon the jarring effect created by this
traditional intonation of the shipwreck situation in post-
Romantic and post-Christian literature. His long fugue on the
theme of sea disaster opens with a grim parody of the Romantic
prospect poem, for rather than attain to a vision of the
Promised [187/188] Land or imaginative grace, Maldoror enjoys a
vision of destruction the destruction of others: I sat on a rock
near the sea. A ship had just put out from shore a fun sail: an
imperceptible dot had appeared on the horizon and was gradually
approaching, growing rapidly, pushed on by the squall. The storm
was going to begin its onslaughts an