What Poets have Sung of the Sea, the Sailor, and the Ship.
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.
“I love the sea; she is my fellow-creature,
My careful purveyor—she provides me store;
She walls me round, she makes my diet greater,
She wafts me treasures from a foreign shore.”[85]
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.”