My cold mad feary father

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  • "But thou art but my fiery father; my sweet mother, I know not." (Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter CXIX)

("sweet mother", cf. Swinburne in Ulysses)

William Blake, Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Fourth (Tharmas, representing Chaos and Flood, is speaking:) "...would I had never risen/ From deaths cold sleep beneath the bottom of the ragin Ocean/ And cannot those who once have lovd. ever forget their Love? (...) When dark despair comes over can I not/ Flow down into the sea & slumber in oblivion."

"Dreamer of furious oceans cold sleeper of weeds & shells"

Compare the first chapter of Ulysses, where the sea, according to Mulligan, is "our mighty mother."

Harold Bloom, in "The Western Canon", says that this image of Ana Livia Plurabelle returning to your Dad is a misreading of Cordelia's death on the arms of her Dad, Lear, in "King Lear", from Shakespeare.