There is Walker McNally, a sodden drunk for whom the pouring and stirring of a drink becomes a kind of sexual foreplay.
It is a kind of hell, but not the spiraling inferno the Stalker Virgil led Dante through, but a sodden, sloppy Tartarus.
His heavy head dropped under water, and his sodden crest rolled over, like sea-weed where a wave breaks.
Who is this sodden old lunatic, and what on earth are you crying for?'
Think of that, and then look at my picture of the sodden, filthy scarecrow!
I went through the dark and sodden wood, and lingered and listened.
Eat not of it raw, nor sodden at all with water, but roast with fire; his head with his legs, and with the purtenance thereof.
My clothes were wet and muddy where I had lain on the sodden ground.
Turning her back, she pulled a sodden photograph from the front of her dress and handed it to her father.
The sodden condition of his imagination distorted his sense of proportion.
"soaked or softened in water," 1820, earlier "resembling something that has been boiled a long time" (1590s), originally "boiled" (c.1300), from Old English soden "boiled," strong past participle of seoþan "to cook, boil" (see seethe). For sense evolution from "heat in water" to "immerse in water" cf. bath.
Old English seoþan "to boil," also figuratively, "be troubled in mind, brood" (class II strong verb; past tense seaþ, past participle soden), from Proto-Germanic *seuthan (cf. Old Norse sjoða, Old Frisian siatha, Dutch zieden, Old High German siodan, German sieden "to seethe"), from PIE root *seut- "to seethe, boil."
Driven out of its literal meaning by boil (v.); it survives largely in metaphoric extensions. Figurative use, of persons or populations, "to be in a state of inward agitation" is recorded from 1580s (implied in seething). It had wider figurative uses in Old English, e.g. "to try by fire, to afflict with cares." Now conjugated as a weak verb, and past participle sodden (q.v.) is no longer felt as connected.
