Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Poems of the Sea
    Poems of the Sea
    Poems of the Sea
    Ebook259 pages1 hour

    Poems of the Sea

    By Adam Nicolson and Gaby Morgan

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Poems of the Sea is an anthology of classic poetry that celebrates the sea; from the power of a stormy ocean to ships and sailors and beaches strewn with shells.

    Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, pocket-sized classics with ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition features an introduction by author Adam Nicolson.

    For generations, poets have taken inspiration from ocean mists and rugged coastlines to conjure up adventures on the high seas and joyous days at the seaside. From Emily Dickinson’s morning dog walks by the shore, to the river running through Sara Teasdale’s sunny valley, and from Walt Whitman’s fish-filled forests, to the silent ships passing in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s dark ocean, there are poems here for every reader to enjoy.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPan Macmillan
    Release dateSep 30, 2021
    ISBN9781529045673
    Poems of the Sea
    Author

    Adam Nicolson

    Adam Nicolson is the author of many books on history, travel and the environment. He is winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and the British Topography Prize and lives at Sissinghust Castle in Kent.

    Read more from Adam Nicolson

    Related to Poems of the Sea

    Titles in the series (100)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      Step Into A Legend

      Jan 13, 2022

      Step Into A Legend
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      County Of Dreaming Spires

      Nov 17, 2022

      County Of Dreaming Spires
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Ancient Britain… From Above

      Oct 20, 2022

      Ancient Britain… From Above
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Rot

      Sep 2, 2022

      Rot
      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Politics of Pinocchio

      Sep 12, 2022

      The Politics of Pinocchio
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Winter Fossil Hunt

      Dec 15, 2022

      Winter Fossil Hunt
      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Wishing You Were Here

      Jun 9, 2020

      Wishing You Were Here
      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Story Of Lakeland

      Apr 7, 2022

      The Story Of Lakeland
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Make Your Garden A Wild Haven

      Mar 10, 2022

      Make Your Garden A Wild Haven
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Siren Song

      Aug 27, 2021

      Siren Song
      10 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      One Down, Several Across

      Nov 5, 2020

      One Down, Several Across
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Circle of Friends

      Jan 7, 2022

      Circle of Friends
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Mountain Time

      Jan 1, 2021

      In the air you don’t know who you are or where My own self feels it is in wind being born These are currents a man made one eighth of smokeless fire fears but chooses A path south from Anchorage to a Mountain House Ungovern the northern land to pass

      10 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Watery Graveyard Revisited

      Apr 27, 2023

      A Watery Graveyard Revisited
      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Pure Waters

      May 5, 2022

      Pure Waters
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Casco Bay Death Ship

      Mar 31, 2020

      The Casco Bay Death Ship
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      In Memory Of Derek Alton Walcott

      Mar 15, 2018

      1 Island traffic slows to a haltas screeching gulls reluctantto lift heavenwardcongregate like mourners in saltcrustedkelp, as the repellentnews spreads to colder shores: Sir Derek is no more.Bandwidths, clogged by streamingtributes, carry the pitcho

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Driftwood's Tale

      Jul 1, 2019

      A Driftwood's Tale
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Entertainment Afloat

      Jan 2, 2020

      In 1963 Charles Stock converted a 16ft 8in Fairey Falcon hull into a midget sailing cruiser, Shoal Waters. She was engineless and gaff-rigged and sailed 70,000 miles around the Thames Estuary over the next 35 years. ‘Don’t just sit there’, says Stock

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Isle of Orleans

      May 18, 2020

      THEY CALLED US AN ISLAND ONCE, “WE” BEING NEW ORLEANS. CERTAIN old maps are marked “Isle of Orleans,” and it’s true we’re surrounded on all sides: the Mississippi River to the south, Lakes Pontchartrain and Maurepas to the north, Bayou Manchac and th

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Wordsworth’s Lake District

      Apr 30, 2020

      Wordsworth’s Lake District
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Tripping The Light Fintastic

      Jul 5, 2023

      ON a peaceful summer’s evening, a beautiful girl with long, golden hair floated in a rockpool near Cury in Cornwall, sobbing inconsolably. An old man drew near and, startled, she leapt, revealing a hint of fish tail. Keen to help a damsel in distress

      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Poems of the Sea

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Poems of the Sea - Adam Nicolson

      Introduction

      ADAM NICOLSON

      The poet Alice Oswald has said recently that ‘the surface of water is complicated by transparency, and its transparency is complicated by refraction . . . The physics or nature of water is metaphysical, meaning that its surface expresses more than itself.’

      That is water’s allure: it can always mean more than itself. It is a substance in the world and yet its meaning, or the meanings it can carry, are as elusive as meaning in music. When Schumann was asked what one of his compositions meant, his answer was to play it again. In music, meaning and being are inextricable – it means what it is – and water shares that quality. It is only itself and yet inevitably more than itself. It is the most layered thing in our daily life. If we could see the air, we would think the same of it, but water uniquely in the physical world fuses opaqueness with transparency; we see what it is and have no idea what it is. Is it any surprise that it is the great medium for poetry?

      Perhaps there is something else in play. Half of all the water in the world, half of all the rivers, lakes and seas, was made before the world began. For billions of years after the universe jumped into being, shock waves from star formation bound together the hydrogen and oxygen atoms that were adrift between the stars. Most of that water still floats across the universe in giant molecular clouds, not unlike the vast streaming rivers of water that transpire from tropical rain forests and flow above them to fall as life-giving rain beyond their borders. ‘The Orion Nebula in our galaxy creates enough water every day to fill the world’s ocean sixty times over,’ the polymath Caspar Henderson has written. There are billions of planets largely or wholly covered in water, ‘either frozen solid or rolling in global oceans tens or even hundreds of kilometres deep.’

      I often wonder if we have some intuition of this; when we stand on a beach or allow ourselves to drift downstream with the current of a river, or feel suddenly alive when casting off from a quay, raising the sails and allowing the boat to move out beyond the headlands, do we then have some recognition that this is the most elemental of experiences, as deep and cosmic an encounter with reality as entering the dark of a rock fissure or a cave, where the ordinariness of life is just as completely suspended?

      All the poems in this anthology recognize, on the surface or not, this otherness of water. Or at least its combination of the primordial and the familiar. And of all the poets of water – leave aside for a moment Shakespeare’s life-long entrancement with the sea – there is none that touches me more than Tennyson. Water for him is everything: the sea itself, its edges, the crossing of those edges, the rocky shore, the tangled margins of a lake, the dark surface of a pool over which mist rises on cold mornings that feel like the beginning or the end of the world, the uncertain sources of a brook in the ‘haunts of coot and hern’ – all become for him the most plangent elements of a giant metaphorical landscape in which love, longing, loss, sorrow, beauty, nobility and the desire for the mystic and the strange find their richest poetic home.

      ‘Crossing the Bar’ is his final water statement. The ancient poet confronts the prospect of life making its turn out into the ocean, a movement so inevitable and so huge that the tide that will take him away ‘seems asleep, / Too full for sound and foam, / When that which drew from out the boundless deep / Turns again home.’

      The words are private, almost hesitant, meditative, a man alone on a shore he knows he will never know again, but also sonorous, the voice of a prophet, speaking from personal wisdom in the knowledge that his understanding is for all of us. The lines carry echoes from the Morte d’Arthur, written sixty years earlier and among the most beautiful water poems in the language, omitted from this collection only for reasons of length. It is one of Tennyson’s many elegies for Arthur Hallam, a man he had loved more than anyone on earth and who had died whilst abroad aged twenty-two. Tennyson transmuted Arthur Hallam into the Dark Age king who in the poem lay dying after the final battle, and who Sir Bedivere, the last of all his knights, took

      to a chapel nigh the field,

      A broken chancel with a broken cross,

      That stood on a dark strait of barren land.

      On one side lay the ocean, and on one

      Lay a great water, and the moon was full.

      Everything a water landscape might become is here, a place ‘where lay the mighty bones of ancient men, / Old knights, and over them the sea-wind sang / Shrill, chill, with flakes of foam’ . . . ‘a waste land, where no one comes, / Or hath come, since the making of the world.’ And there, on the waters of ‘the level lake’, under ‘the long glories of the winter moon’, Tennyson’s Arthur is taken by the three strange Queens of death onto the dark barge that

      Moved from the brink, like some full-breasted swan

      That, fluting a wild carol ere her death,

      Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood

      With swarthy webs.

      T. S. Eliot called Tennyson ‘the saddest of all English poets’, and it may be that his natural melancholy found in water the medium that was most responsive to a sense of uncertainty, a floatingness, of the world and our life no more than half-tethered to anything sure. Water may be entrancing for the sense of possibility that waits in every molecule, but it is daunting for the same reason: you cannot know where you are with it, ‘as if swaying were its form of stillness’, as D. H. Lawrence wrote of seaweed and might just as well have said of water itself.

      Without warning, this anxiety can turn on its head. All the jack-tar adventurousness that comes swinging out in the brio and swagger of the sea shanties here, the sheer delight in raising the anchor and easing the sheets, the world inhabited by ‘the master, the swabber, the boatswain and I, / The gunner and his mate,’ is only the other side of this liquidity of water. The sea-world is a world to be lived in. Everything is possible there. It is the spirit alive in John Masefield’s ‘wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking’ and it is in the great hymn to the voyage made by Columba or Colum Cille, the Dove of the Church, sailing from Ireland to Iona in the seventh or eighth century:

      He brings northward to meet the Lord a bright crowd of chancels –

      Colum Cille, kirks for hundreds, widespread candle . . .

      He crossed the wave-strewn wild region, foam-flecked, seal-filled,

      Savage, bounding, seething, white-tipped, pleasing, doleful.

      That energy of what Homer called ‘the unfenced sea’ is the energy of life itself. But it is also its destructiveness. Every part of the sea that gives you life will also give you death. That is the tension at the heart of every sea poem, from the Odyssey onwards. And it surges up again and again in Shakespeare. Timon of Athens is a tyrant whose idea of himself is a noble, constant and generous man, ‘not of that feather to shake off / My friend when he must need me’, but he comes to the end of his life disgusted with the shifting hypocrisies of men. He loathes people and all their works. And so, in the self-dramatizing and self-referential way of the Shakespearean hero, he has his tomb made not in the security of dry land but on the very edge of the tide, ‘where the light foam of the sea may beat / [His] gravestone daily’. ‘Come not to me again, but say to Athens,’ he announces to his followers, that he

      hath made his everlasting mansion

      Upon the beached verge of the salt flood;

      Who once a day with his embossed froth

      The turbulent surge shall cover.

      The words mimic the trouble of the place his body will lie: not an everlasting mansion but a tumultuous shore, full of the breaking of the surf, alive with unrest. As Alice Oswald has said, ‘the sea in its dark psychosis dreams of your death.’

      There are some who have not liked Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ – Robert Frost among them – because it does not approach the world with the gaiety or optimism that they require. But it is one

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1