Dream-like, plangent, and eternal
Memories of the plunging sea.
No English poet of distinction so often even mentions the Sea or creates such Homeric epithets for the Sea as does Bliss Carman. A catalogue of Carman’s original epithets for the Sea, if complete, would be a poetic phenomenon by itself. Some of the most apt and fetching may be noted—‘the hollow sea,’ ‘the curving sea,’ ‘the old gray sea,’ ‘the plunging sea,’ ‘the shambling sea,’ ‘the brightening sea,’ ‘the troubling sea,’ ‘the lazy sea,’ ‘the open sea,’ ‘the heaving sea,’ ‘the eternal sea,’ ‘the ruthless noisy sea,’ ‘the misty sea,’ ‘the ancient ever-murmuring sea,’ and that supreme achievement in English poetry, Carman’s inevitable, perfect line:—
The glad indomitable sea!
For lovers of sea poetry Carman’s Ballads of Lost Haven: A Book of the Sea (1897) is a genuinely unique anthology by itself—‘one hundred pages,’ as a London critic has said, ‘of salt sea without a trace of Kipling, and yet having a sea-flavor as unmistakable as his, and with a finer touch—with less repetition, less of mere technicality, and a more varied human interest.’ For Carman the Sea is a human personality. Its moods and deeds embrace all the contradictory moods and deeds of human beings. But whatever mood or deed of the Sea is expressed by Carman, he does it with pure and perfect lyricism. Carman is said to have no gifts for spiritual portraiture. Yet what English or American poet has matched Carman’s portrait of the Sea as a shambling, fierce, grim, rollicking, burly, cruel, crooked, old man, and at the same time created such a brave and lilting song of the Sea, as in The Gravedigger, with its inimitable burly refrain?—
Then hoy and rip, with a rolling hip,
He makes for the nearest shore;
And God, who sent him a thousand ship,
Will send him a thousand more;
But some he’ll save for a bleaching grave,