Englisn Poels and the Sea.

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1629, 21 December 1912, Page 16

Englisn Poels and the Sea.

M. Douady, who is a Professor at tho University of Lyons, has 6ot himself a difficult task and porformed.it with unflagging spirit.-.'But.tlio diverse ingenuities which he practices to malco 0110 chapter after nnothor interesting prove, better tliau any dullness could, that ho has chosen a subjcct that is no subject. Since England is an island, a Sea I'owor, and. a homo of poets, ono-might expect that her poets would-bo greatly concerned withtho sea, that it would conio into .their verso as oi'ton as the mountains conio into tho pictures-.of Titian and other Italian pamters who lived in tho shadow qf tho Alps. Professor Douady seems to begin at Beowulf with this expectation. Then ho jumps to Chaucer still expectant, and thou to Spenser and Shakespearo, more &anguino than ever; for between Chaucer and Spenser, as ho in a clevor chapter, tho ocean had been discovered. -Ho Logins to show some embarrassment in his chapter on tho sea in the seventeenth century, and whon he deals with Milton ho can no longer conceal 'the straits in which ho finds himself. Ho is reduced to a paraShraso of Milton's account of tho third ay of Creation and to a translation of has description of tho building of tho Ark. By this timo tho dullest reader must be awaro that English poets, so far, have no special ooncorn with tho sea. It comes into their poetry now and again, as it might come into the poetry of any. nation; but it.. certainly does. not. surround their subjects with any persistent gleams and murmurs as it surrounds the 'shores of England. There is no English poet of high rank up to the timo of tho Romantic movement who writes of the sea as if it had played a large part in. his experience. Shakespeare writes well of it, . t'f course; •in ' "The Tempest," in "King Lear," ; n "Pericles"; and he is said by experts to show nautical knowledge. But then he writes well of many things, and evidently had a great power of acquiring technitai knowledge wnen he needed it for some dramatic purpose. _ We need not suppose because of the shipwreck in "Tho Tempest" that he had ever been a sailor; ' indeed, there are more legal than nautical images in his poetry, and he may well havo seen tho sea only once or twice in his life., For England, though an island, is a large one; and before the timo of; railways most of her inland poets must have seen the sea as seldom as our poets of to-day see the Alps. They knew of its existence and heard tell of its wonders; bui they wero not impelled to write of it as of the spring, or of love, or of death. Tho sea come 3 into The Tempest," as Venice comes into "Othello' or Verona into "Romeo and Juliet." because it belongs to the story, not because Shakespeare wished to tell his own experiences of it. V , After the Armada, of course, the sea l>egan to sound in patriotic, poetry, goodand bad. It was no longer a terror but a defence; and M. Douady pokes a little fun at us for our prevailing belief that we are a nation especially favoured by God because He has surrounded us with the sea. We defeated tho Spanish Armada, he says, not because the winds and waves fought for us, but because wo were better seamen than the Spaniards; and he prefers, for its sentiment as well as for its execution, "Toll for tho Brave to "Rule, Britannia." Indeed, it is significant that the finest sea-song of-the eighteenth century should havo > been written by a poet who had as little intercourse with the sea as any spinster in Epgland, v and about no., triumph, but a ■sudden and capricious disaster. But Kempenfelt is gone, , ' , His victories are o er; _ And ho and his eight hundred Shall plough the' wave no more.

The pompous, official..'copy of verses tells us that Britannia rules the waves; but the poet, "who cannot think or feel oflicinlly, is concerned for the_ price that Britannia has to; pay. He ,is proud of his country, but. weeps' for':,the, men who have died for her; and to~ him the sea is not an obedient servant of our destinies, but the old, treacherous, untamed monster. With • a worse disaster still fresh in our minds, we may, like fll. Douady, prefer tho sentiments of Cowper to the sentiments of Thomson and un-, derstand that they aro expressed ,in better verso because they are more real. • Mr Douady: in his determination to know all that can bo known about, his subject, has,read Falconer s Shipwreck, • and even manages to make a livc.v chanter about it. Falconei was a Bailor and himself lost his life, in a shipwreck, but he did not manage to mako poetry of his technical knowledge:—'. Torn from their planks, tho cracking ring-bolts drew, And gripes and lashings all aßtindor Companion, binnacle, in floating wreck, With compasses and glasses strew the The balanced mizzen, rending to the In fluttering fragments from its bolt-rope fled, The landsman leading this is ,P" zzl< j4 through, his own ignorance; but it could not bo poetry to the most accomplished sailor. It is merely prosaic kno\vi«d o e displayed in verse; and a ffi'an can no more make poetry about the sea because he knows it well than he can make poetry about the kitchen for the same reason., Falconer might have written the better carts of his poem if ho had never been to sea in his life; indeed, his' technical knowledge is a hindrance, to him, sineo it tempts him. to detail incongruous with the generalising stylo.- of- his v ® r^ e ,' , M. Douady remarks upon the contrast between tho "Shipwreck and The Ancient Mariner," tho one written by a sailur who had been shipwrecked himself, the other by a metaphysician, knowing nothing of ships or the sea, * n< U£ the finest sea-poem m our literature. tins contrast is enough to prove tho point wo wish to make, namely, that it is not particular experience of tho sea which has producod fine sea-poetry,.but rather a certain attitude towards the whole of nature, an attitude which was first exnressoti in the poetry of the Romantic | movement. "The Ancient Manner is a groat sea-poem, not merely because it is the story of a voyage, but because the sea iB, as it were, one of the characters in it rather than a circumstance. So in a Chineso picture a tree is often a rather than a circumstance, and seems to be oti equal terms- with the human figures represented. In romantic poetry Sally natural things aro often on fnuil terms with human beings, and tlio life of nature seems as intense, and full of purpose as tho life of man. This is not the pathetic fallacy except in rhetoric like Byron's notorious address to the ocean. The poet does not read his s rroWs "tntsa ?«MtMn of her, ho gets more from her. , s "ence with its detaohment has passed into his imagination, and there, fusing with emotkm! has made a new heaven and a new earth and particularly a now sea. If some' earlier poet, however great, had written "The Ancient Manner he would have mado the sea only a terrible part r machinery of the poem. It 19 that in n-he Tempest," except for the dirge £ suddenly and strangely introduced, as jf 6hakespearo's mind had leapt forwaids two hundred years into the Eomantio movement and made a song so wonderful to hjimself that ho could not but give it to the world. But in "Tho Anciont Mariner" tho wholo slory suffers a sea change. That verso which carries the shfp f.o far carries tho reader's mind also into an unknown world The fair brcezo blew, tho white foam Tho"furrow follow'd free: Wo were tho first that ever burst Into that silent sea. Prom that time onwards the poet's whole imagination in transformed as if lie had travelled all his hie upon tho waters and whatever happens seems to be, like some music, a mood of tho sea mado articulate;— , Tho moving moon wont up tho sky, .\)kl nowhere did abide: Softly she was going up. And a star or two beside. Her bo.iins l;cnioeked the sultry mam, Like April hoar-frost spread; Hut where tho ships It use .shadow lay, The charmed water burnt alwny A still and awful red.

As for tho wator-snakcfl, thoy ore tho lifn of tlm sen, almost cnpablo of communicating its secret, and movin|[ in beauty us children danco on tho earth— Within tho shadow of tho ship / watched their rich attiro: Bluo, [{lossy green, and velvet black, Thoy coilod and swam; and ovary track Was a flash of goldon firo. In a gloss Coleridge calls thorn God's creatures cf tho groat calin, and tho .Mariner Llbsscd thorn unawnro, boing moved by thorn as lonely oromites have been moved by tho croaturca of tho wilderness. 1 1 In tho '/Ancient Mariner" ivo fcol that tho life of tho sea continues all the while independent of tho story, making a strange counterpoint with tho Mfo of tho man who in lost upon it) and in other romantic poems eon and olty tojjotfcor niako a world as empty of humanity as if man lind never boon created, and yot seeming to bo conscious of thorooclves and their own beautiful procoM of boing. Ami when Sunset may breatho, from tho lit t.ea beneath, Its ardour of rest and of love, And the crimson pall of evo may fall From tho depth of ho,wen abovo, With wings folded I rest, on mino aory nest, As still as a brooding dove. There Shelley's cloud speaks like a cloud,, not liko a fanciful poet, and in ono of tho fino passages of "The Revolt of Islam" Cythna, who is novor very human, seems to becomo a sea bird as she stands upon a rock abovo the waves: My spirit moved upon tho sea like wind Which round eorno thymy capo will lag and hover, Though it can wake tho still cloud, and unbind The strength of tempest; day was almost over, Whoii through the fading light I could discover , A ship approaching—its whita sails were fed With the north, wind—its moving shade did cover Tho twilight doep. . Passages such as these, in which humanity seems diffused and almost lost in space, are the best part of "Tho Revolt, of Islam" and of many romantic poems;and they express a real effort of the human mind, not systematic and consciously mystical as in the Bast, to escape from the prison of self and selfinterest and to becomo one with Nature, like Adonais. In this effort there is a daring of the spirit which takes peculiar delight in the sea because of its danger and vastness. The sea is for it a symbol of the encircling mvstery and freedom of infinity; and Shelley in his •hunger for death speaks; naturally of being driven Par from the shore, far from tho trembling throng . ■ ', .Whose sails were never to the tempest given. So, too, Matthew Arnold, brooding on the doubtful destiny of man, hopes for a possible freedom to coruo at last As the pale waste widens. around him— As.the banks fade-dimmer away— As;.the stars come out, and the nightwind ■ Brings ■ up the stream Murmurs and scents of the infinite sea. ; 'M. 'Douady's lastchapter is naturally on Swinburne, the one poet in whose verse tho sea actually seems to sound and to make a music never heard in poetry before. His language often seems artificial, but his mu.ic is natural to a fault, being sometimes a. music of mood rather than of 6ense. M. Douady calls him a visionary, and says that oompared - with him Shelley himself is lucid and explicit; for his thoughts, his images, his very language, have the recurrence and tho uncertainty of troubled seas. Certainly Swinburne, when he writes of tho sea at large, when he 'allows himself to be carried away by his mere delight in it, is. ; apt to be formless. The sea /by itself is not enough subject matter , for him. He ■needs some other theme interwoven with it, as in "At a Month's End," where-the' hearts of a man and a woman are repealed in-fiea-images as they walk sk and where sea musio sounds in l, the! human thought. ISill of cold clouds and moonbeams drifted . And streaming storms and straying Out souls in us were stirred and sUifted ' by doubts and dreams and foiled desires. > Across, aslant, a 6cudding sea-mew_ Swam, dipped, and dropped and grazed the sea; And one with mo I could not dream you; . And one with you I could not be. To Swinburne the sea was not merely a splendid spectacle. It was mora. even than a symbol of the state of being that he desired. He drew strength and peace from it as a mystio draws them from communion with an unknown power. liie •sea reconciled him to life and gave him faith in it, whatever its issue might bo, for it seemed to him that the glory o.f the , visible world must have some correspondence in the invisible, as the material .beauty of art is an expression of a high purpose in the mind of the artist, i) or hiin also, as for Shelloy, the sea meant; the great adventure of death, Mid the imagery in his lines on the death 01 his. father is as natural as the music: Four score years since, and como, tut . one month * more ... . , Tho count were perfect of his mortal Whose sail went, seaward yesterday from shore , To cross tho last of many an unsailed sea. There romantio poetry has become class-ical,-but with a new enrichment got from a now experience. Death itselt has suffered a sea chango in tho, mmd of the poet, whose business was indeed with '.great .waters and who bathed his spirit in them as he bathed his body. .—"London. Times."