Nature has always inspired writers, but no aspect of nature has been more inspirational than the sea. Consider Homer’s Odyssey, Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. From sailors’ shanties to Moby Dick, the sea has inspired countless songs and works of literature. There is something incredibly romantic about the ocean that compels people to seek the horizon, explore our inward seas, and write about the journey.
Let’s talk about Sea Poetry. First, a shout out to Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and Samuel Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, in my opinion two of the greatest sea poems ever. If you haven’t read them, I highly recommend you repair that educational omission. You’ll be glad you did.
And now here are three of my favorite sea poems:
The Skeleton In Armor
As a child, I encountered this poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in a 1922 edition of Journeys Through Bookland, Volume 5. The picture above both frightened and fascinated me, and I returned to this poem and its accompanying illustration again and again. In the poem, the writer encounters a skeleton in armor. It’s a Viking skeleton, and the Viking relates the saga of his sea journey from Scandinavia to North America accompanied by a beautiful maiden he stole from her father. Here is a sample stanza:
And as to catch the gale
Round veered the flapping sail,
Death! Was the helmsman’s hail,
Death without quarter!
Mid-ships with iron keel
Struck we her ribs of steel;
Down her black hulk did reel
Through the black water!
In this stanza the maiden’s father and his henchmen are chasing the Viking ship carrying the stolen girl. The Viking rams their ship with his iron keel and sinks it. Everyone on board dies. The story is wild and pagan; even the rhythm and meter catch the reader up and make the heart beat faster. To read the complete text, go to http://www.poetry-archive.com/l/the_skeleton_in_armor.html
Sea Fever
This poem by John Masefield is another I read as a child. “Sea Fever” celebrates the imperative call of the sea. For those who have felt it, there’s nothing like it. For those who haven’t, I can’t explain it but Masefield does a pretty good job. Here is one stanza of “Sea Fever”:
I must go down to the seas again,
To the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way
Where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn
From a laughing fellow-rover
And a quiet sleep and a sweet dream
When the long trick’s over.
One thing I like about this poem is that it gets the idea across that for those who hear it the ocean’s call trumps all else. The sea life can be lonely and cold and dangerous, but it’s both compelling and magical. If this isn’t a Tsunami Ranger poem, I don’t know what is. The complete text is available at http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Poetry/MasefieldSeaFever.html
The Jumblies
I hope you have all heard of Edward Lear. He is famous for his limericks and of course, for writing “The Owl and the Pussycat”. But he also wrote “The Jumblies”, a poem which I find very sweet and rather poignant. It’s yet another of my childhood favorites. Here’s the first stanza:
They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,
In a Sieve they went to sea:
In spite of all their friends could say,
On a winter’s morn, on a stormy day,
In a Sieve they went to sea!
And when the Sieve turned round and round,
And everyone cried, “You’ll all be drowned!”
The called aloud, “Our Sieve ain’t big,
But we don’t care a button! We don’t care a fig!
In a Sieve we’ll go to sea!”
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
When I was rereading this poem recently, it occurred to me that their heads are green because they’re seasick. Their hands are blue because they’re cold. Their lands are far and few because there aren’t many beings like them, probably because they do things like going to sea in a sieve. But it makes a great yarn. Find the complete text of “The Jumblies” at http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/ns/jumblies.html
What are the common elements here? Words that come to mind are: wild, exotic, fierce, unconformable, daredevil, free. This is Life with a capital “L”. There is a sense of abandon, of flinging caution to the winds and being drawn deliciously if perhaps fatally into adventure. But whatever happens, the experience will be full and rich and unforgettable. This is the romance of the sea. I hope you have enjoyed these samples of sea poetry.
Please share some of your favorite books or poems about the sea. If you’re like me, you’re always looking for a good read, especially sea lit!
These are really beautiful poems. Thanks for these article. Is there a book that contains a lot of these poems with illustrations?
So glad you enjoyed the poems. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any book that deals exclusively in poetry about the sea, although you’d think there’d be one out there somewhere. There’s an opportunity for someone! As I said above, I discovered “The Skeleton in Armor” in a volume of miscellaneous literature for young people. The same with “Sea Fever”, except I found that in the Childcraft series, which my mom used to sell door to door way back in the day. It does have a lovely watercolor illustration. I also have a very fragile book of Edward Lear’s works published by The Looking Glass Library. It contains all of his work plus illustrations, which are pretty amazing, but it’s so old there’s no ISBN # or even copyright or publication date. I’ve had it since early childhood, but I think I’ve seen it once at an antique book store. Wish I could be more helpful:)
Californians have one of their own as a compelling poet of the sea and shore: Carmel’s Robinson Jeffers. When I first encountered the poetry of Robinson Jeffers in junior college back in the 1960s, the power of his work struck me with an almost physical force that I can recollect with perfect clarity to this day. While Jeffers was the most famous poet in America in the late 1920s and early 1930s, even appearing on the cover of TIME, today he is largely ignored and forgotten except for those like me to whom Jeffers spoke so eloquently, and also for a part of the environmental community who found much to admire in his work. A Sierra Club book, Not Man Apart, edited by David Brower, featured photos of the Big Sur coast coupled with excerpts of Jeffers’ poetry. Herewith just one small example…..
BOATS IN A FOG
Sports and gallantries, the stage, the arts, the antics of dancers,
The exuberant voices of music,
Have charm for children but lack nobility; it is bitter earnestness
That makes beauty; the mind
Knows, grown adult.
A sudden fog-drift muffled the ocean,
A throbbing of engines moved in it,
At length, a stone’s throw out, between the rocks and the vapor,
One by one moved shadows
Out of the mystery, shadows, fishing-boats, trailing each other
Following the cliff for guidance,
Holding a difficult path between the peril of the sea fog
And the foam on the shore granite.
One by one, trailing their leader, six crept by me,
Out of the vapor and into it,
The throb of their engines subdued by the fog, patient and cautious,
Coasting all around the peninsula
Back to the buoys of Monterey harbor. A flight of pelicans
Is nothing lovelier to look at;
The flight of the planets is nothing nobler; all the arts lose virtue
Against the essential reality
Of creatures going about their business among the equally
Earnest elements of nature.
Holy Cow, Carl! Thank you so much for sharing that poem and so glad you were inspired to comment. Having lived 12 yrs near Princeton Harbor south of San Francisco I totally realate to that poem. I have a volume of Jeffers’ poetry – I was turned on to him my my good friend, poet and martial artist Ed Burgess back in the 70’s when I was at college. My favorite of his is “The Bloody Sire”, but that’s not about boats.
“It is bitter earnestness that makes beauty…” mmmmm.
Nancy, about 20 of Jeffers’ poems are my favorites; it’s hard to pick out any one as the best of the best, though Hurt Hawks would come very close–it’s the first poem by Jeffers that I encountered, and it almost took the top of my head off. But here’s another; one that is rarely anthologized…..
CREDO
My friend from Asia has powers and magic, he plucks a blue
leaf from the young blue-gum
And gazing upon it, gathering and quieting
The God in his mind, creates an ocean more real than the
ocean, the salt, the actual
Appalling presence, the power of the waters.
He believes that nothing is real except as we make it.
I humbler have found in my blood
Bred west of the Caucasus a harder mysticism.
Multitude stand in my mind but I think that the ocean in
the bone vault is only
The bone vault’s ocean: out there is the ocean’s;
The water is the water, the cliff is the rock, come shocks and
flashes of reality. The mind
Passes, the eye closes, the spirit is a passage;
The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient unto
itself; the heart-breaking beauty
Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.
Those last two lines: “The beauty of things…….Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.”, are beyond poetry.
Jeffers was not a mystic, but in this poem and in a few others, he does come close to expressing views similar to a very rarely-encountered form of mysticism: Extrovertive Mysticism. Almost all writings of and about mysticism concern Introvertive Mysticism; in this poem Jeffers contrasts broad, simple versions of each, and clearly states his preference.
I’m really pleased that you also appreciate Jeffers; let’s exchange some more favorites. The Bloody Sire is a fine example of Jeffers’ several efforts to deal with war, a subject that came very close to shattering his attempts to find some sort of lasting overview that would immure him from the travails of this world.
“Hurt Hawks” is a good one. I’m not familiar with “Credo” but it speaks to me as one who has a pretty solid yoga and Buddhist/Taoist practice. After reading the boats poem it occurred to me that Jeffers is kind of the Ansel Adams of poetry. I don’t know if that’s legit, but that’s what I thought. I’ll have to look over my Jeffers collection again.
Also, extrovertive and introvertive mysticism are new terms to me but I get it.
PELICANS
Four pelicans went over the house,
Sculled their worn oars over the courtyard: I saw that ungainliness
Magnifies the idea of strength.
A lifting gale of sea-gulls followed them; slim yachts of the element,
Natural growths of the sky, no wonder
Light wings to leave the sea; but those grave weights toil, and are powerful,
And the wings torn with old storms remember
The cone that the oldest redwood dropped from, the tilting of continents,
The dinosaur’s day, the lift of new sea-lines.
The omnisecular spirit keeps the old with the new also.
Nothing at all has suffered erasure.
There is life not of our time. He calls ungainly bodies
As beautiful as the grace of horses.
He is weary of nothing; he watches air-planes; he watches pelicans.
Herewith my final offering of a Robinson Jeffers poem on a maritime subject. Enjoy!
Okay, this is too funny. I got out my “Selected Poems of Robinson Jeffers” (ed. Tim Hunt). Saturday night some friends were over and we got into this huge discussion of poetry and my friend was dissing Jeffers and then he read some Gary Snyder out loud and I said, “Hmmm, sounds like Jeffers could have been an influence” and we looked Snyder up online and sure enough Jeffers was listed as a major influence in Snyder’s work. Hilarious. Then on top of everything I was looking for a poem that would suit this thread and I came up with “Pelicans”. Not fair! Now I have to look for another one, and I’ve gotten sidetracked by “Tamar”.