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Mick Delap sets Magma’s new sea poems alongside the rich freight of earlier sea poetry and, with the assistance of Graham Fawcett, Carrie Etter, and Laurie Smith, begins Magma’s search for the best sea poem ever written.

   2005 is the two hundredth anniversary of Nelson’s victory at the battle of Trafalgar and, to mark the occasion, the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich has taken the lead in SeaBritain 2005, a year-long campaign to celebrate Britain’s long love affair with the sea. Magma, in partnership with SeaBritain 2005 and the National Maritime Museum, is devoting a significant portion of this issue to sea poetry (including our own light-hearted tributes to Nelson himself). But as Andrew Motion pointed out in his recent series on Radio Four, the sea no longer defines the peoples of the British Isles as it did in Nelson’s day or even as recently as the 1950s. It is not now how most of us set off to travel the world nor the main bulwark of our defence. That hasn’t prevented Magma contributors responding to my appeal for new sea poems for Magma 32 by sending in the biggest mailbag we’ve received so far and arguably one of the finest in terms of the quality of the writing. Something about the sea still moves today’s poets. I have had, sadly, to reject many good poems. But how well do those which did make it into Magma 32 link with the great sea poems of the past? And (given that so many first rate poets not usually seen as connected with the sea have produced at least one fine sea poem – see Anne Sexton’s The Boat, for example), what are the truly great sea poems and sea poets?

Graham Fawcett lectures and writes about poetry in London, and has strong views about how the world’s poets have always been central to the challenge of what he calls “Measuring the Sea”.

                                       
                                           

   Graham Fawcett’s own nomination for the best sea poem written, out of all those he’s listed, is Hardy’s superb account of the fatal meeting of iceberg and Titanic, The Convergence of the Twain. As Fawcett points out, disaster at sea has always attracted the great poets. There’s Homer and those he’s inspired into imitation, following Ulysses from one ship-wreck to another; William Cowper’s “man overboard” cautionary tale, The Castaway (chosen as one of his favourite sea poems by Magma’s chair, David Boll); and the New England poet Robert Lowell, lamenting the death of his cousin in The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket, my nomination. To make up your own mind, you can read it (and Homer, and Hardy, and all the other great sea poems) conveniently gathered in the recent Everyman Pocket Poets Poems of the Sea, edited by J. D. McClatchey. Lowell’s there, among a strong showing of New England poets. How well they write the sea, these East Coast Americans – and, according to Carrie Etter (who teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University College and reviews contemporary poetry in a wide variety of journals), none better than Elizabeth Bishop.

                                          

Carrie writes:

   At the Fishhouses has long been one of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems that, glancing over the first few lines, I cannot put down or pass up. Yet its first sentence seems ordinary enough.

      Although it is a cold evening,
      down by one of the fishhouses
      an old man sits netting,
      his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
      a dark purple-brown,
      and his shuttle worn and polished.

   The slight surprise of the old man working in the cold leads into meticulous, yet unstrained, unpretentious description. Each line presents a distinct piece of the scene, allowing an image of the whole to build steadily. No sooner am I seeing than I am smelling, the smell of codfish “so strong … / it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water.” The originality and clarity of the image of the man netting draw me into the poem, and the extremity of the violent smell, later matched by the water burning a hand and tongue, gives me a forcible sense of my own presence in the scene as a reader, an onlooker.

   So too with the extent and breadth of description that follows the codfish smell. The appreciation and intelligence evident in this account subtly develops the speaker as a character who enters the poem explicitly when she (for I cannot help, knowing Bishop’s background, identifying the speaker as a woman) offers the old man a cigarette.

      The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.
      He was a friend of my grandfather.
      We talk of the decline in the population
      and of codfish and herring
      while he waits for a herring boat to come in.

   While the words are matter of fact, the rhythm gives the lines a meditative tone that complements the portrait of a conversation on a cold night. Watching with the old man for the incoming boat leads the speaker’s eye to the ramp that will be used to bring it in, and her eye descends from there into the water: “Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, / element bearable to no mortal, / to fish and to seals...” That ellipsis gives way to what may seem like a tangent, the speaker’s relation of her “exchanges” with a seal. On the one hand, the seal and the speaker seem to appreciate one another, the seal watching her as she sings Baptist hymns, for, she supposes, they are both “believer[s] in total immersion”(!). Yet for all her speculations about it, the seal remains a distant, independent figure, only partially knowable. Hence she turns again to the sea as the yet more elusive object – “Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, / the clear gray icy water…” Here she briefly portrays the firs behind her, old and familiar, before venturing on what she can say about the sea.

   She describes how the sea appears, how it feels to the touch (inducing an ache and causing a burning sensation “as if the water were a transmutation of fire”), and how it tastes, to set up the concluding declaration.

      It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
      dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
      drawn from the cold hard mouth
      of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
      forever, flowing and drawn, and since
      our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

   This is how we envision knowledge, maternal yet hard, fluid and so both present and past. Throughout the poem, the speaker has shown her way of knowing the world: considering all she sees without prejudice for high or low and establishing commonality as a basis for connection with other living creatures. This does not establish knowledge so much as tap into its “dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free” passage, as bound to time as the old man, his worn scaling knife, the rusted capstan, and the very populations of fish, now in decline. Because knowledge is historical, and because to some extent we can only “imagine” what it is, we cannot take our own sense of knowledge for granted. We must, like the speaker, engage and participate in the world; we must be willing to burn our hands in the briny water.

                                          

   Carrie Etter describes how the poet builds from description of a harbour scene to a profound contemplation of the sea’s elusive nature; and then moves us, with her, into a renewed appreciation of the mystery at the heart of the world we inhabit. The greatest sea poems often move in a similar way from contemplation of the sea itself into much deeper emotional and intellectual territory. Andrew Motion, Poet Laureate, regards one such poem, Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, as one of his two top sea poems (also the choice of Magma’s Tim Robertson). Magma poet Henry Shukman puts Derek Walcott’s The Schooner ‘Flight’ in the same league. And many of the new sea poems in this issue of Magma develop in a similar way. They also often share, with Arnold, Bishop, Lowell, and Walcott, a strong sense of the layered histories the sea both hides and reveals. None of Magma’s sea poets, though, match the extraordinary journey Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner takes us on – in what for John Stammers and many others is a clear favourite for top sea poem. But some sea poems are great precisely because they neither voyage nor dive deep, choosing instead to spend all their energy on trying to capture how the sea actually looks. For Magma’s Laurie Smith, Wallace Stevens’ Sea Surface Full of Clouds, is one such poem.

                                          

Laurie writes:

   For me, this is the best poem about the sea and, simultaneously, the finest poem about perception since Keats. It asks a question – how does one describe a calm sea? – and answers it exuberantly, with sheer joy in the use of words and a playfulness that we gradually realize, with slight shock, is self-mockery.

   The poem takes a single moment: an early morning when the swell has fallen and the sea is perfectly calm. It is based on experience. In October 1923, Stevens and his wife sailed from New York on a cruise to California via Havana and the Panama Canal, their first extended holiday since their marriage 14 years previously. On the last leg, they passed the Mexican town which gives the first line of each of the five sections: “In that November off Tehantuapec...”

   Each section envisions the moment when cruise-ship passengers come on deck, sit under the umbrellas, drink chocolate and look at the sea. It is a sea so calm that the clouds are reflected, and reflected differently, on the surface and in the depths. The scene is described five times, and from the end of the poem 

                                        Then the sea
      And heaven rolled as one and from the two
      Came fresh transfigurings of freshest blue

we know that the possible descriptions are infinite. We can compare it to Monet’s series of paintings of Rouen Cathedral or his garden at Giverney, but the comparison isn’t close – a painting reveals itself simultaneously to the eye while a poem is read sequentially and consists of words with associations.

   Each section is a variation on the first; each describes the chocolate and the umbrellas under which the passengers drink it, and each describes the sea as a machine. The first is neutral, suggesting how things look in early morning sunlight:

      And in the morning summer hued the deck
      And made one think of rosy chocolate
      And gilt umbrellas...

but the first sign of undermining humour appears at once: the sea is “the perplexed machine / Of ocean, which like limpid water lay”. Perplexity and the machine-like quality of the ocean are in the mind of a beholder faced merely with “limpid water” – the actual ocean is reduced to simile in the service of a self-important metaphor of perception.

   By section 3, the mind has come to doubt itself: “An uncertain green, / Piano-polished, held the tranced machine / Of ocean, as a prelude holds and holds...” – and by section 4 gives way to the high-sounding but ludicrous: “A too-fluent green / Suggested malice in the dry machine / Of ocean, pondering dank stratagem”. The last section surrenders to the sense of fun that has been held back throughout: “The day / Came, bowing and voluble, upon the deck, / Good clown...” The laziness that cruise ships require takes over and “a motley green / Followed the drift of the obese machine / Of ocean, perfected in indolence.” The power that moves the clouds is seen as a shipboard entertainer, a blacked-up juggler.

   Having variously described the clouds and sea, Stevens asks the great Romantic question – not what is responsible (the scientific question) but who? And in each section he answers with a line of French. Lionel Trilling wrote that the greatness of Mansfield Park is commensurate with its power to offend and the same is true here. Stevens deliberately uses a language that few Americans, even educated ones, can read. He does this simultaneously to be absurdly pompous and to disguise the fact. In the first three sections, the
originator of the scene is given as (I translate):

    It was my child, my jewel, my soul
 
    It was my heavenly brother, my life, my gold

(not, one notes, my heavenly father)

    Oh! It was my ecstasy and my love...

By section 4, where Neptune makes a brief appearance, the gaff is blown – “It was my faith, divine nonchalance” – and by the end the admission is made: “It was my bastard spirit, a sense of the ridiculous”.

   After these lines, which the unwary reader can easily take as sonorously serious, Stevens ends each section with six lines describing the sea’s transformation as he watches. They are the most beautiful descriptions of a changing sea that I know, at once inventive, elegant and rejoicing in the possibilities of language. I can give only one:

      The gongs rang loudly as the windy booms
      Hoo-hooed it in the darkened ocean-blooms.
      The gongs grew still. And then blue heaven spread
      Its crystalline pendentives on the sea
      And the macabre of the water-glooms
      In an enormous undulation fled.

   There’s no space to describe the poem’s varied rhymes, its rich variety of rhythms or its echoes of Keats’ odes to which, as Helen Vendler has shown, Stevens returned again and again throughout his writing career.

   Sea Surface marked a turning point in Stevens’ life. He seems to have been relaxed and happy. He and his wife were away for two months, returning from California to Connecticut in stages by train. Their only child, Holly, was conceived shortly after their return. Stevens’ first collection, Harmonium, had been published just before his departure and he was looking forward eagerly to the reviews.

   On his return, he found that Harmonium had been ignored or, with the exception of Marianne Moore, misunderstood. His disappointment was evidently acute – he seems to have written only one poem in the next six years, the longest lacuna in a long writing career. When he returned to poetry, his style was more measured and overtly philosophical. He never attempted the sheer joyousness of Sea Surface again.

                                          

As Laurie Smith points out, Stevens was writing from experience of the sea – but as a pampered passenger on the deck of a cruise liner! One major strand of sea poetry comes from much nearer sea level, written by those who were themselves seafarers, the sailors and fishermen who saw the sea daily in all her moods. It’s a poetic tradition that starts very early in English with the Anglo-Saxon Seafarer – the second of Andrew Motion’s top sea poems, mentioned also by Magma’s Mark McGuinness. A similar work, this time in Gaelic, the Birlinn of Clanranald, is the choice of Magma poet Jane Routh. And a more recent seafaring poet, John Masefield, would top many people’s lists, with his Sea-Fever (“I must down to the sea again …”) and Cargoes (“Dirty British coaster with a saltcaked smoke stack…”). Indeed, Cargoes, heard on the radio while she was sick in bed with measles, made an eight-year old Mary MacRae decide there and then she wanted, one day, to be a poet.

   That seafaring, sea-writing tradition was carried on from Masefield by two disgracefully neglected poets, the American communist George Oppen, and the British W.S. Graham. Graham went to sea as a fisherman, Oppen as a yachtsman, but both poured their knowledge and love of the sea and its traditions into their sea poems (both have recent “Collected’s”, Oppen from Carcanet, Graham from Faber). They have few genuine successors as seafaring poets today. One would be the shipwright poet Martin Newell whose Song of the Waterlily, about the building of a wooden Essex smack, is top sea poem for the Director of the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, Roy Clare. But the tradition lives on. See, in this issue of Magma, the poems of Henry Shukman (one time trawlerman), Jane Routh and Theo Dorgan (both at home on the deck of a 21st century yacht). As Jane Routh says, “It’s in the blood. Isn’t it?”