Meaning & Analysis
When a moving body of water like a stream or tide is obstructed, the water level behind the obstruction rises, and the pressure increases. Blocking the flow makes the water swell higher and become more forceful.
Insights
Suppressed Emotions
The proverb serves as a powerful metaphor for the intensification of emotions when they are suppressed. Feelings such as love, anger, or grief, when denied expression, do not disappear but grow stronger and more volatile, risking a destructive outburst.
The Power of Prohibition
Obstacles and prohibitions placed in the path of desire often have the paradoxical effect of making the desire more potent and compelling. The act of forbidding something can heighten its allure and the determination to attain it.
Resistance and Rebellion
On a social or political level, attempts to repress a movement, an idea, or the will of the people can strengthen their resolve and lead to a more forceful rebellion. Oppression can breed a more powerful resistance.
The Danger of Over-Containment
The proverb warns that containment has its limits. Applying excessive control or restraint to any powerful force—be it emotional, social, or natural—will inevitably lead to it breaking its bounds with greater violence than if it had been allowed a natural course.
Literary and Dramatic Trope
The proverb's prevalence in Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, particularly in Shakespeare, underscores a Renaissance fascination with the volatile nature of human passions. It serves as a key literary trope to explain the intensification of forbidden love, grief, or political rebellion when faced with opposition.
Psychological Insight
This proverb articulates a principle akin to the modern psychological concept of 'reactance'—the tendency to resist constraints on freedom, often by strengthening the prohibited belief or behavior. It intuits that suppressing emotions or desires does not eliminate them but rather causes them to intensify and potentially erupt uncontrollably.
Nature as Allegory
The proverb draws a parallel between a law of physics (hydrodynamics) and a perceived law of human nature. This use of the natural world as a mirror for psychological truth is characteristic of a pre-modern worldview, where natural phenomena were seen as allegories for human experience.
Rhetorical Devices
Extended Metaphor
The core of the proverb is a powerful metaphor where the 'stream' represents any persistent force, such as emotion, desire, or a social movement, and the 'dam' represents suppression or opposition.
Dynamic Imagery
The proverb uses vivid, kinetic imagery of a swelling, raging body of water to make the abstract concept of suppressed energy feel tangible, urgent, and potentially destructive.
Causal Structure
The proverb is structured as a direct cause-and-effect relationship ('stopped' leads to 'swells higher'), giving it the weight of an undeniable, natural law.
Personification
In many of its literary uses, the stream is personified, described as having rage, impatience, or will, which emotionally equates the natural force with human passion.
Transcription
Quotations
As the swift running stream if it be not stopped runneth smoothly away without noise, but if there be any dam . . to stay the course thereof, it rageth and roareth and swelleth above the banks.
Hast thou not redde Euphues, that . . hee that stoppeth the streame forceth it to swell higher?
I have read sweete Love, in the Aphorismes of the Philosophers, that heate suppressed is more violent, the streame stopt makes the greater Deluge, and passions concealed, procure the deeper sorrowes.
The bankes are ouerflowen, when stopped is the flood.
Do not force loue, where fancy cannot dwell, Lest streames being stopt aboue the banks do swell.
Loue doth increase when it is withstood.
As . . the stream stopt makes the greater deluge: so passions concealed, procure the deeper sorrows.
Water it selfe if bounded in too straight, Will foame and swell and breake thick bonds of Rock.
Shakespeare Citations
An oven that is stopp'd, or river stay'd, Burneth more hotly, swelleth with more rage.
My uncontrolled tide Turns not, but swells the higher by this let.
Deep woes roll forward like a gentle flood, Who, being stopp'd, the bounding banks o'erflows.
The current that with gentle murmur glides . . being stopp'd, impatiently doth rage.
Say, shall the current of our right run on? Whose passage, vex'd with thy impediment, Shall leave his native channel and o'erswell With course disturb'd even thy confining shores, Unless thou let his silver water keep A peaceful progress to the ocean.
His unjust unkindness, that in all reason should have quenched her love, hath, like an impediment in the current, made it more violent and unruly.
Like the current flies Each bound it chafes.
Like interrupted waters, and o'erbear What they us'd to bear.
Cross References
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
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