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ABSTRACT.
This paper aims to trace the feminine side of the imagination of water as it appears in poetry. Water is usually associated with the feminine principle, the maternal principle, the subconscious, the dark side or the obscurity of the feminine psychic powers, and last but not least, with the depths of the human mind. A great variety of writers let water organize their imagination, creativity and art. Feeling its feminine characteristics, poets animate the waters of the soul with their stirring, fluid imagination. This paper looks at just one side of the metaphoric richness of water: its feminine side. But this side has many facets, all of them being supported by extraordinary figures of speech and extremely beautiful images emerging from the great collective cultural and historical reservoir of structures.
Keywords: feminine water; maternal water; primary substance
Water was the archai proposed by the Pre-socratic Thales of Miletus, who tried to reduce all things to a single substance. At the same time, water has always been an important theme, motif, source of imagination in literature and not only.
The motif of primordial water is universal since it appears in almost all cosmogonies, symbolizing, as Mircea Eliade noticed, "the primordial substance, from which every form is bom and in which everything comes back, through regression or cataclysm."1
The motif of water appears, probably for the first time in literature, in Rig-Veda, one of the oldest texts, composed between 1700 and 1100 BC, in the Punjab region of the Indian subcontinent. Water is an eternal element, "the waters flow on forever."2 The Vedic Hymns praise water as it bears life, force and wisdom. Thus, we recognize one of the feminine elements, one of the energies of depth, which will later create impressive images in literature around the world. In fact, water, life giving, fertile, changing and mysterious, has long been equated with the feminine aspects of creation, nature and spirituality.
The feminine energies give us life as well as heal and care for it. In RigVeda, water is, also, a way of purification: "Whatever sin is found in me, whatever evil I have wrought. If I have lied or falsely sworn, Waters, remove it far from me."3
The Babylonian civilization has several important literary creations,...