Three Poems about the Sea – Analysis and Commentary

THREE POEMS ABOUT THE SEA – ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY

What does the ocean or sea symbolize? Because the ocean is vastly expansive and unexplored, it is fraught with mystery. It is often identified with existential boundlessness and darkness.

The ocean is also a primordial reality in the Bible. It is the ocean which is present at the very beginning of the creation of the material world by God.

ARIEL’S SONG by William Shakespeare

The Tempest, II, 1, 471-81

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:

[Offstage] Ding-dong.

Hark! now I hear them—

[Offstage] Ding-dong, bell.

See: https://www.litcharts.com/shakescleare/shakespeare-translations/the-tempest/act-1-scene-2

 

—Ben Florman, “The Tempest: Shakescleare Translation, Act 1, Scene 2,” LitCharts

Ariel’s ditty reaches us from centuries past as one among Shakespeare’s most memorable passages, like Macbeth’s soliloquy or “The Seven Ages of Man.”

The Tempest is a magical universe in which Ariel, a fairy, hypnotizes Ferdinand, one of the play’s protagonists, by singing a whimsical, sweet, and alluring song.

Transported in imagination and spirit to Renaissance England, we enter a time of great discovery wherein ideas about the world and the place of the European in it are rapidly changing.

“Full fathom five”—for the Renaissance seaman, five fathoms was the depth at which no shipwreck could be recovered.

“Sea-change”—the idiom originates here.

Text of the next two poems is copied from the Poetry Foundation website.

SEA FEVER by John Masefield

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;

And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,

And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide

Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;

And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,

And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

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 quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54932/sea-fever-56d235e0d871e

A famous poem by a famous poet, John Masefield, British poet laureate, 1930-67—much has been said in the literature about the merits of this traditional poem—its stirring sentiment, sensuous imagery, astute metaphors, and especially, rhythmic use of meter to convey a sense of swelling motion.

I would remark that the poem hearkens to the seafaring heritage of the UK, a maritime power whose ascendancy began in the Renaissance and that maintains to this day.

Someone at the receiving end of the British Empire when it was a colonialist hegemon might experience this poem differently—for them the sea would probably not symbolize the freedom of the “gypsy life” but rather colonialist oppression. Quidquid recipitur...

FLOWERS BY THE SEA by William Carlos Williams

When over the flowery, sharp pasture’s

edge, unseen, the salt ocean

lifts its form—chicory and daisies

tied, released, seem hardly flowers alone

but color and the movement—or the shape

perhaps—of restlessness, whereas

the sea is circled and sways

peacefully upon its plantlike stem

See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53078/flowers-by-the-sea-56d23210587cf

A poem that derives from the Imagist style—Williams seeks, to cite Ezra Pound’s Imagist manifesto, “direct treatment of the ‘thing’” and “to use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.”

The “thing” is the sea, concisely presented—bouquet of chicory and daisies tied and then released; floating, swaying plant leaf anchored to an underwater stem; the shape of restlessness—in series, metaphors imaginative, unusual, precise. 

Waves Breaking on a Lee Shore at Margate (c. 1840) by J. M. W. Turner