By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
What are the greatest sea poems? We’ve scoured the oceans of verse to bring you these ten classic seafaring poems, covering over a thousand years of English-language poetry. So if you’re ready to take to the sea, we’ll begin…
1. Oliver Tearle, ‘Sea Glass’.
… this cocktail of colour, found among the rocks,
crafted by the patient ocean’s constant dance,
leads this same glass to lose its former lustre.
But whilst it loses this, it gains a gloss
of frost slow-formed that shapes a stronger matter,
a shell as tough as nature can command,
and fragile glass becomes as hard as diamond.
Permit us to begin with a short poem written by our own founder-editor (the full poem can be found via the link above). Sea glass is glass that has been weathered by the ocean, which turns the broken glass from bottles into natural frosted glass.
The process of converting real glass into sea glass takes decades; the point of the poem is that, just as brittle glass is weathered by the years and the elements, so we are weathered, but also shaped, by the passing years as we grow older. Glass loses its original slickness when it becomes sea glass, but it acquires its tough, frosted appearance which makes it durable and resilient.
2. Anonymous, ‘The Seafarer’.
This 124-line poem is often considered an elegy, since it appears to be spoken by an old sailor looking back on his life and preparing for death. He discusses the solitariness of a life on the waves, the cold, the danger, and the hardships. As such, the poem captures the bewitching fascination the sea holds for us, but also its darker, more unpredictable side. Ezra Pound produced a loose translation of the poem in the early twentieth century.
Men who have never known hardship would be unlikely to believe the seafarer’s description of the difficulties of life at sea. The seafarer is without a lord, without wine or the company of women: all he has are the waves surrounding him. No man undertaking such a life could fail to fear, at least a little, what the Lord (Jesus) might have in store for him at the end – i.e., what his fate might be.
3. Edmund Spenser, from Amoretti LXXV.
One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
‘Vain man,’ said she, ‘that dost in vain assay,
A mortal thing so to immortalize;
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wiped out likewise.’
One of the earliest sonnet sequences written in English, Amoretti dates from the mid-1580s and features this fine sonnet about the poet’s seemingly vain attempt to immortalise his beloved’s name by writing it on the sand at the beach – the tide comes in, and the name is washed away.
Spenser’s beloved chastises him for his hubris and arrogance in seeking to immortalise her in this way, when she is but a woman, and only mortal. Her body will itself decay one day, much as her name has disappeared from the sand; her ‘name’, as in all memory of her, will be wiped out, just as her (literal) name has been erased from the shore.
4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’.
And the good south wind still blew behind,
But no sweet bird did follow,
Nor any day for food or play
Came to the mariner’s hollo!
Is this the greatest English poem about a sea-voyage? Coleridge’s friend and collaborator was sceptical about its merits, and toyed with removing it from subsequent editions of their landmark collection Lyrical Ballads (1798).
Yet this story of a mariner and his crew, who suffer terrible misfortunes after they ill-advisedly kill an albatross, has become a classic long narrative poem and one of the defining poems of the English Romantic movement. In Watchet in Somerset, there is a statue of the Ancient Mariner, marking the place where Coleridge conceived of the idea for the poem.
5. Emily Dickinson, ‘I started Early – Took my Dog’.
I started Early – Took my Dog –
And visited the Sea –
The Mermaids in the Basement
Came out to look at me …
This poem is about a trip to the seaside. But when is the sea not the sea? When it’s a symbol for carnal longings – as this poem appears to be. Dickinson is using the sea as a metaphor for the (female) speaker’s sensual awakening: note the mermaids, which came out from the basement (the sea’s bed, or the subconscious?) to look at the speaker.
6. A. E. Housman, ‘Smooth between sea and land’.
This little-known gem of a poem picks up on the motif present in Spenser’s sonnet mentioned above: what should the poet write on the sand for future generations to read? Nothing – for it will not last, and ‘the confounding main’ will wash over it and erase any sign that anyone had written something there.
The theme of writing something in the sand at the coast, in the vain hope that it will endure long after the writer has died, is an old one, as the Spenser poem above demonstrates. But in Spenser’s poem, the poet ended with the reassuring thought of immortality and the existence of God. Housman, who became an atheist while he was still a teenager, can off no such consolation here.
Nothing: too near at hand,
Planing the figure sand,
Effacing clean and fast
Cities not built to last
And charms devised in vain,
Pours the confounding main.
Read the full poem by clicking the link above.
7. John Masefield, ‘Sea-Fever’.
One of the most famous sea poems in English literature, ‘Sea-Fever’ was published in 1902 in Masefield’s collection Salt-Water Ballads, when the poet was in his mid-twenties. Although its opening line is most familiar as ‘I must go down to the sea again’, it began life in its 1902 incarnation as the slightly odder ‘I must down to the seas again’.
8. H. D., ‘Oread’.
The critic Glenn Hughes called Hilda Doolittle or ‘H. D.’ the perfect Imagist, since her poetry brilliantly encapsulated the short, precise images that were at the heart of the short-lived Imagist movement led by Ezra Pound in the second decade of the twentieth century.
‘Oread’ takes its name from the nymph of the mountains and pine trees, and is presumably spoken by this land-nymph, which calls upon the sea to ‘whirl up’ and cover the rocks with its ‘pools of fir’. A love poem but also a nature poem.
And yet, the cleverness of the imagery is that the pools of fir could be a description of the green sea (resembling fir trees) or a description of actual fir trees whose green pine needles are washing over the mountains. This ambiguity is doubtless deliberate, because it fuses the land and the sea, the water and the trees, in one seamless image, suggesting the longed-for meeting of the two.
9. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Dry Salvages’.
The third of Eliot’s Four Quartets, ‘The Dry Salvages’ – although it sounds like a most unwatery poem – actually takes its name from les trois sauvages, a group of rocks off Cape Ann in Massachusetts. The five sections of the poem offer various meditations on water – look out in particular for the tour de force that is Eliot’s take on the sestina form at the beginning of the second section.
The first of the five sections of ‘The Dry Salvages’ is especially worth reading for its comparative analysis of the river and the sea. The ‘strong brown’ river is the Mississippi, which is ‘untamed and intractable’, and has served as a frontier and as a conduit for commerce. But unlike the river, which is within us, the sea is all about us. The river is a ‘god’, but the sea has ‘many gods’ and ‘many voices’: a polytheistic force of nature.
10. Philip Larkin, ‘To the Sea’.
Although he’s often thought of as a somewhat gloomy poet, Larkin (1922-85) had his tenderer, more celebratory moments too, such as in this, the opening poem from his 1974 collection High Windows, describing the annual ritual of the British family seaside holiday.