DIRECTIONS FOR WRITING
In order to write poetic prose you must write from genuine emotion. Write about something that you really love. Choose your words so that they will most clearly reveal your feelings. Think of the deeper meanings and of the greater values of your subject. Make your essay increase steadily in power until the very end. Make it, like a good lyric poem, reveal the writer's best self in one of his noblest moments.
SHIPS THAT LIFT TALL SPIRES OF CANVAS[159]
By RALPH D. PAINE
(1871—). An American author and journalist, especially noted for excellent work as a war correspondent. Among his many books concerning the sea are the following: The Praying Skipper, and Other Stories; The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem; The Judgments of the Sea; The Adventures of Captain O'Shea; The Fighting Fleets; The Fight for a Free Sea. He is a frequent contributor to magazines.
Ships That Lift Tall Spires of Canvas is practically a poem, although it is written in prose. It is an emotional expression of admiration for the sailing vessels of the past, and for the gallant sailors who manned them. It is evident that the author is familiar with many stories of romantic voyages and grim adventure on the deep, and that his emotion springs from his knowledge. That genuineness of feeling did much to lead him to choose suggestive words and to write in balanced and rhythmical sentences. All good style comes in large part from earnestness of thought or depth of emotion, and in smaller degree from knowledge of the rhetorical means of conveying thought or emotion.
Oh, night and day the ships come in,
The ships both great and small,
But never one among them brings
A word of him at all.
From Port o' Spain and Trinidad,
From Rio or Funchal,
And along the coast of Barbary.
Steam has not banished from the deep sea the ships that lift tall spires of canvas to win their way from port to port. The gleam of their topsails recalls the centuries in which men wrought with stubborn courage to fashion fabrics of wood and cordage that would survive the enmity of the implacable ocean and make the winds obedient. Their genius was unsung, their hard toil forgotten, but with each generation the sailing ship became nobler and more enduring, until it was a perfect thing. Its great days live in memory with a peculiar atmosphere of romance. Its humming shrouds were vibrant with the eternal call of the sea, and in a phantom fleet pass the towering East Indiaman, the hard-driven Atlantic packet, and the gracious clipper that fled before the Southern trades.
A hundred years ago every bay and inlet of the New England coast were building ships that fared bravely forth to the West Indies, to the roadsteads of Europe, to the mysterious havens of the Far East. They sailed in peril of pirate and privateer, and fought these rascals as sturdily as they battled with wicked weather. Coasts were unlighted, the seas uncharted, and navigation was mostly guesswork, but these seamen were the flower of an American merchant marine whose deeds are heroic in the nation's story. Great hearts in little ships, they dared and suffered with simple, uncomplaining fortitude. Shipwreck was an incident, and to be adrift in lonely seas or cast upon a barbarous shore was sadly commonplace. They lived the stuff that made fiction after they were gone.