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Conradi states that the direct source of the title is Paul Valéry's poem "Le Cimetiere Marin" ("The Graveyard by the Sea"). A line in the poem's first stanza quotes the Greeks' shouts: "La mer, la mer, toujours recommencėe" (The Sea, the sea, forever restarting). Murdoch refers to the poem in several of her books, and this stanza appears in full at the end of chapter 4 in her 1963 novel " The Unicorn".