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—
“In a troubled sea of passion tossed.”
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—
“Rude as their ships was navigation then,
No useful compass or meridian known;
Coasting, they kept the land within their ken,
And knew no north but when the pole-star shone.”
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.