Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
It's big, it's blue, it's teeming with millions of creatures from the ultra-tiny to the incredibly huge—no wonder the sea is The Wanting Seed's hands-down favourite symbol for fecundity and life. Just get a load of Beatrice-Joanna standing on the seashore the day her son has died:
She held an intuitive conviction that, if there were a God, He inhabited the sea. The sea spelled life, whispered or shouted fertility; that voice could never be completely stilled. If only, she felt crazily, poor Roger's body could have been thrown into those tigrine waters, swept out to be gnawed by fish, rather than changed coldly to chemicals and silently fed to the earth. She had a mad intuitive notion that the earth was dying, that the sea would soon be the final repository of life. (1.3.2)
As Beatrice-Joanna continues to stand there and muse, a few lines from an old poem she once knew pop into her mind—lines from the French poet Paul Valéry's Le cimetière marin (The Graveyard By the Sea), to be precise:
'Vast sea gifted with delirium, panther skin and mantle pierced with thousands and thousand of idols of the sun—' She had read that somewhere [. . .]. (1.3.2)
One thing to keep in mind about sea symbolism in The Wanting Seed is that in French, the word mer (sea) is a homophone of the word mère (mother). That's an association that French writers love to exploit, and Anthony Burgess is definitely drawing on it too. Just as the sea "spells life" for Beatrice-Joanna, so too do maternal bodies "spell life" in The Wanting Seed.