By The Book

Poems of the Sea

By P.J. Mills

The Return

I will go back to the great sweet mother,

Mother and lover of men, the sea.

I will go down to her, I and none other,

Close with her, kiss her

and mix her with me;

Cling to her, strive with her, hold her fast;

O fair white mother, in days long past

Born without sister, born without brother,

Set free my soul as thy soul is free.

-Algernon Charles Swinburne

Memorial Day in the Hamptons is a time of return, return to the sea and the summer days of sun and frolic. This return to summer life by the sea recalls to mind not only Swinburne's poem, included in the lovely Everyman's Pocket Poets edition of Poems of the Sea, but also the Azilians, a prehistoric people who once lived along the coastlines of Europe and never ventured very far from the sea.

Like the Azilians of long ago, some people, and I include myself among them, are what I call neo-Azilians, people who need the sea the way we need air to survive. The sea calls us to return to her when we stray too far away. Many years ago I discovered a nineteenth century neo-Azilian in Virginia Woolf's essay "Lives of the Obscure," and have never forgotten her. Woolf paints a picture in words of a married woman with children who could not stay long away from the sea without feeling bereft.Landlocked most of the year in the Midlands of England, she had a craving for the sea so strong that she would often steal away from home alone, telling no one but her husband where she was going. Once she arrived at the coast she took a short sea voyage by booking passage on a miserable little packet-boat that plied the waters off the coast of Ireland. She stood on deck all day and well into the night, wrapped in a shawl, her head covered by a bonnet, trying to satisfy her hunger for the sea, and became a familiar figure to the men who piloted the boat. I have always thought those boatmen must have understood her need without ever having to speak to her about it, for they too were drawn to the sea.

In years past, when I myself was landlocked, I would sometimes drive 200 miles to watch the sun rise over the ocean from Judith's Point at the tip of Rhode Island, then drive 200 miles back home to go to work, satisfied in my soul. At that time I had not yet discovered this little gem of a book.

Poets have always felt a mystical connection to the sea, and have sounded the depths of humanity's nautical dreams, fears, and longings. From the poetic imagination has emerged not only colorful legends of mermaids, the lost city of Atlantis, pirates, and shipwrecks, but Poe's elegiac "Annabel Lee" and Coleridge's dark meditation, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," two poems in this marvelous collection. Also included are old favorites like John Masefield's "Sea-Fever," and "The Seafarer," a poem that describes the hardships of life at sea only to reveal that even the adversity of a seaman's life cannot diminish his love of the sea. Emily Dickinson's "Exultation is the going" is here, as is Shakespeare's "Full Fathom Five" from The Tempest; so too is Keats's "On the Sea" and Baudelaire's "Man and the Sea." There are poems by Plath, Tennyson, T. S. Eliot, Whitman, and Longfellow, as well as an excerpt from Homer's "Odyssey."

The book includes sonnets, ballads, hymns, and sea chanteys to satisfy every mood offered up by the sea. In a wide variety of lyrical forms, both the power and the mysterious beauty of the sea are evoked.

As you take your first beach walk this season and feel the primal pull of the sea:

Gather a shell from the strewn beach

And listen at its lips: they sigh

The same desire and mystery,

The echo of the whole sea's speech.

-Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Poems of the Sea, Selected and Edited by J.D McClatchy, Everyman's Library, Pocket Poets, 251 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $13.50

Back to Contents