The Poet of the Sea still Wanting—Biblical Allusions—The Classical Writers—Want of True Sympathy with the Subject—Virgil’s “Æneid”—His Stage Storms—The Immortal Bard—His Intimate Acquaintance with the Sea and the Sailor—The Golden Days of Maritime Enterprise—The Tempest—Miranda’s Compassion—Pranks of the “Airy Spirit”—The Merchant of Venice—Piracy in Shakespeare’s Days—A Birth at Sea—Cymbeline: the Queen’s Description of our Isle—Byron’s “Ocean”—Falconer’s “Shipwreck”—His Technical Knowledge—The “True Ring”—The Dibdins—“Tom Bowling”—“The Boatmen of the Downs”—Three Touching Poems—Mrs. Hemans, Longfellow, and Kingsley—Browning’s “Hervé Riel”—The True Breton Pilot—A New Departure—Hood’s “Demon Ship”—Popular Songs of the Day—Conclusion.
The sea, the sailor, and the ship, have been fertile subjects for the poets, although countries and lands, and those who dwell therein, have occupied by far the larger part of their attention. Sooth to say, however, there has not yet arisen a single great writer whose name could fairly be identified with the ocean as its own particular poet. There may be reasons for this. The poet is usually of delicate organisation, and is more likely to be found studying Nature on the quiet shore than on the turbulent ocean. Maybe he is practically a recluse, accessible to a few only; and if of social nature, and not averse to companionship amid the busy haunts of men, he yet shrinks from the roughness usual to, though not inseparable from, the men of the sea. The modern facilities of travel, enabling the student to con Nature with comparative ease, may some day aid in producing a representative poet of the sea. At present the position is vacant.
In days of old, however, the poet prophets, David the sweet singer of Israel, and one or two writers in the New Testament, gave glimpses of the ocean which indicated an acquaintance with the subject. Nothing can well be finer than the Psalmist’s conception of the mariner’s life and its dangers in the lines commencing:—
“They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters;
“These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.”
The prophet Jeremiah draws a beautiful though pathetic picture of the ocean’s unrest when he says: “There is sorrow on the sea, it cannot be quiet;” and the serious poets have followed his outlines. Milton describes one—
Michelet defines its “many voices,” its murmur and its menace, its thunder and its roar, its wail, its sigh, its “sublime duets with the rocks.”
The classical writers of antiquity had little sympathy with the sea. We have seen [pg 291]Horace’s opinion of that man’s boldness who first trusted himself in a frail vessel on the merciless ocean; and, as Dryden shows us, there was good reason for a general dread of the sea, at least on the part of landsmen—
Virgil’s “Æneid” is essentially a sea-poem, yet a writer of critical acumen considers that “in literature the sea is all the worse for Virgil having dealt with it.... The poem, as nobody needs telling, begins its events with a tremendous sea-piece. In the very first sight we get of the hero and his companions they are dividing the foaming brine with their keels, and the initial incident is a shipwreck. The description assuredly has overwhelming vigour in it...; an impression of unusual turmoil is given, and that is what Virgil sought, but it is got by a jumble of violence of every kind. Winds, billows, lightning, thunder, reefs, shallows, eddies, are mixed together. The only detail of disaster left out is collision among the ships, which with a fleet so crowded is the one thing that would have occurred had this been a natural storm. Such a tempest now rages in a transpontine theatre, and in no other part of the world; it takes Neptune himself to still it in the ‘Æneid.’ ”86 And yet Virgil lived long by the glorious Bay of Naples; and the famous ode of Horace, praying that he might have fair weather, shows that he had made at least one voyage.
If a poet has a genuine feeling for his subject, the lightest epithets he applies may tell a story. What terms does Virgil employ? They are somewhat commonplace. Boundless, mighty, swelling, windy, faithless, deep, dark, blue, azure, vast, foaming, salt, and so forth, are well enough, but they do not compare with many of Shakespeare’s, and later poets. Take three of Shakespeare’s: the “yeasty” waves, the “multitudinous” sea, and the “wasteful” ocean. These epithets are in themselves admirable descriptions.
The works of our immortal bard are full of allusions to the sea, and show an intimate acquaintance therewith. Perhaps Shakespeare’s knowledge is in this instance less surprising than in some other directions, for although we have no proof that he ever left the shores of old England, and are quite certain that he never ventured far, his was a golden day in the history of maritime enterprise. The reign of the Virgin Queen, during the larger part of which he flourished, saw the defeat of the Armada, and many another repulse in the Spanish colonies. It was the day of such naval heroes as Howard of Effingham, Drake and Hawkins, Raleigh and Frobisher. It witnessed the first English voyage round the world, the discovery of Virginia—to say nothing of Virginia’s tobacco and potatoes—the establishment of the profitable whale fishery and the disgraceful slave-trade, the inauguration of that long-time monopoly the East India Company, and numerous lesser developments in commercial prosperity.
Appropriately, then, the play of Shakespeare which more particularly than any other deals with the sea is that which is generally placed at the commencement of the series in the [pg 292]published editions. The Tempest opens with a storm “on a ship at sea.” The fury of the gale increases, and the vessel is nearly on the rocks. “We split! we split! we split!” sings out the honest old Neapolitan councillor, Gonzalo, adding—
But neither he nor his master the king suffers death by shipwreck, for amiable and tender-hearted Miranda intercedes with her father. Prospero reassures her, though Ariel, it will be remembered, had been playing many a prank on the unsuspecting mariners, and with lightning and thunder-claps and “sulphurous roaring,” had fairly frightened them out of their wits. All but the mariners had “plunged in the foaming brine and quitted the vessel”:—
[pg 294]Sings the “airy spirit,” adding, however—
And so with the kindly spirit and the rightful Duke we may leave the tempest-tossed mariners.
In the Merchant of Venice we have admirable illustrations of the troubles and anxieties of a merchant shipowner of the day. Antonio is sad. “Your mind,” says Salarino, “is tossing on the ocean.” Antonio’s friends continue:—
So Shylock, though ready to advance the three thousand ducats to Bassanio on Antonio’s bond, doubts whether the ships bound to Tripolis, the Indies, Mexico, and England, may not come to grief. For “ships are but boards, sailors but men; there be land-rats and water-rats, land-thieves and water-thieves—I mean pirates; and then, there is the peril of waters, winds, and rocks.” Soon after it was spread on the Rialto that Antonio had “a ship of rich lading wrecked on the narrow seas; the Goodwins, I think,” says his friend, “they call the place; a very dangerous flat, and fatal, where the carcases of many a tall ship lie buried;” and this was followed by the news that not one of his vessels had escaped
All, however, ends happily, and the argosies, richly laden, arrive in safety.
[pg 295]Piracy on the high seas in Shakespeare’s days may be said to have been of two kinds: that which was practically legalised, for purposes of reprisal on foreign foes, and that which was for private and individual plunder. How prevalent it was may be gathered from the passages indicated below.88
In Measure for Measure we find the freebooter’s calling satirised in the comparison: “like the sanctimonious pirate that went to sea with the Ten Commandments, but scraped one out of the table”—that one, of course, being, “Thou shalt not steal.” Their reckless life is literally described by Richard Plantagenet in the Second Part of King Henry VI., where he says—
while Suffolk dies by pirates later on. In the same historical play King Henry again describes his condition, harassed by the rebel Jack Cade and the troublesome Duke of York, as
Queen Margaret in Richard III. addresses three noble lords as
In Pericles Shakespeare introduces the not uncommon episode of a birth at sea, which occurs in a terrible gale, the mother apparently dying immediately afterwards, to be later cast into the sea in a chest, and revive when thrown upon the shore.
And for our last Shakespearian quotation, in Cymbeline we have a fine description of our own little island and its impregnability. “Remember,” says the Queen—
Next to Shakespeare in intimate knowledge and power to portray, Byron must be placed. What can be grander than his well-known apostrophe to the Ocean?—
The poet par excellence of the sea, partly on account of the literary merits of his production, but more by reason of his technical correctness, was William Falconer, the author of “The Shipwreck,” on the title pages of all the older editions of which he is described simply as “a sailor.” His poem, which is in three cantos, was founded on actual incidents in a shipwreck from which himself and but two or three of the crew were saved. Again, in 1769 he embarked on board the Aurora frigate on a venture to the East Indies, but from the time the ship left the Cape of Good Hope no information was ever received of her, and she is believed to have foundered with all hands, including the poet. Falconer, although a disciple of the Muse, wrote a political satire, entitled, “The Demagogue;” while his Marine Dictionary is, in its revised form, a recognised authority to-day. The poem on which his fame rests is remarkable for the absolute correctness of its details. Take, for example, the following passage, which could not have been written by a landsman-poet:—
[pg 298]And so forth. The fact is, that most readers of Falconer’s poem require his “Dictionary of the Marine” at hand, or some old “salt” to explain the constantly recurring nautical terms.
It is not wonderful that so many of our poets have written more or less concerning the sea, few passing over the grand subject entirely, when we consider England’s paramount position on and interests in it. A number of them have produced works in which we seem to sniff the briny ocean as we read them, while only a minority have written artificially and without a true feeling for their subject. Much that the Dibdins91 indited for the concert-room, the theatre, and to an extent for the sailor himself, is of a trivial nature, dealing largely—too largely—with grog and sweethearts, and more than occasionally verging on the coarse and indelicate. But among their productions are songs with the true ring, ballads that will never die while our language lasts or Britain “rules the waves.” Among these may fairly be counted Charles Dibdin’s “Poor Jack,” “The Greenwich Pensioner” (“’Twas in the good ship Rover”), “The Sailor’s Journal” (“’Twas post-meridian, half-past four”), and, above all, that noble picture of a true sailor, “Tom Bowling”—
Eliza Cook92 has followed the same vein in her “Gallant English Tar,” and has also paid a worthy tribute to those hardy sons of Neptune, “The Boatmen of the Downs.”
Perhaps no modern verses are more popular with all lovers of true poetry than the “Casabianca” of Mrs. Hemans, Longfellow’s “Wreck of the Hesperus,” and Kingsley’s “Three Fishers;” and no wonder, for they touch a chord in every heart, while vividly portraying the perils of a seafaring life. In the story of the “burning deck” we have the record of a true sailor boy, who would not desert his “lone post of death.” And—
In the second-named poem the skipper has taken his little daughter to “bear him company.” A hurricane rises, and it is the poor frightened child who alone hears the “fog-bell on a rock-bound coast.” She runs to her father:—
The ship drifts into the breakers and on the cruel rocks.
In Kingsley’s poem, “three fishermen sailed away to the West,” thinking of their much-loved home; “three wives sat weeping in the lighthouse tower.”
No more splendid tribute has ever been paid to a neglected hero than that which appeared in the pages of a popular monthly93 some years since, over the honoured signature of Robert Browning.
[pg 301]The year 1692 was specially disastrous to France, and a fleet of twenty-two vessels were hotly and closely pursued by the English. The squadron came helter-skelter, “like a crowd of frightened porpoises” with the sharks after them, to St. Malo on the Rance. The pilots who were on board laughed at the bare idea of their great ships entering the rocky passage; and Damfreville, the admiral of the fleet, was seriously thinking of blowing up or burning all his ships, when out stepped in front of all the assembled officers a poor coasting-pilot.
“Are you mad, you Malouins? are you cowards, fools, or rogues?” said he, as he hurriedly and impetuously assured the admiral that he knew every rock and shoal, and could lead the fleet in safely.
So all are saved, and the crews see longingly the green heights above Grève, all bursting out, with one accord—
Turn we now to a “new departure” in sea poetry, one partially inaugurated by the Dibdins, carried on by Tom Hood the elder, and having of late years William Schwenck Gilbert for its principal exponent. It is often as full of nature as the serious productions of other poets, yet itself favours the ludicrous and satirical side. Hood’s “Demon Ship” is a fair example—
After battling with the water, and half insensible, he finds himself at last safely on board a strange vessel; a terrible face haunts him—black, grimly black, all black, except the grinning teeth. The sooty crew were like their master. “Where am I? in what dreadful ship?” cried he, in terrified agony. The answer was a laugh that rang from stem to stern from the gloomy shapes that flitted round. They guffawed and grinned and choked to the top of their bent—
The transition from the really powerful and dramatic description of the billows and surf to the ridiculous dénouement is irresistibly and artistically comic. Hood’s purely amusing pieces are more generally known than the above. Take as an example “Faithless Sally Brown;” the girl who so soon forgot her first Ben is modelled on Dibdinian lines, but the touches of humour are infinitely more delicate.
The popularity of a class of sea-songs which can now be heard from the streets to [pg 304]the drawing-room, and from the fo’castle to the ward-room, is creditable to our age. Some of these productions, in which noble sentiments, expressed in simple and feeling words, are wedded to effective and artistic music, help to keep alive humanity, love, and honour in the rising generation. “The poor old slave is free” directly he climbs the British ship; “the sailor’s wife the sailor’s star should be,” and usually is; while the story of the poor little wounded “midshipmite” is as touching in its way as the boy who would not leave the burning deck.
Our voyages are ended; and we may now peacefully peruse, by the cosy fireside, the record of the heroic deeds and the startling perils of the sailor’s career while he is engaged in bringing to our shores the necessaries and comforts of our daily life. While we stay at home in ease, let us not forget this noble army of “conscripts, fighting our battles for us;” and when the tempests howl and the lightnings flash, let us breathe our heartfelt earnest prayers “for those at sea.”