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This anthology of sea poems is published in association with the National Maritime Museum as part of the 200th anniversary celebrations of the Battle of Trafalgar. Anvil Press’s offices are in Greenwich, a few streets from where Nelson’s body lay in state before his funeral, and it is fitting that Peter Jay, Anvil’s founder and himself a Greenwich resident, should have undertaken this commemorative anthology. An unexpected irony is the realisation that the sea may now need the occasion of an historical event to make it worth celebrating.

   As one would expect, the book contains many of the great sea poems in the canon: The Seafarer; Sir Patrick Spens; Shakespeare’s Full fathom five (given, unusually, in its dramatic context); Marvell’s Bermudas; Cowper’s The Castaway; part of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; Tennyson’s Kraken, Crossing the bar and Break, break, break; Arnold’s Dover Beach and To Marguerite; Hardy’s The Convergence of the Twain; Masefield’s Sea-Fever and Cargoes; and Stevens’ Idea of Order at Key West.

   But an anthology is also judged by what it brings new to the subject and here The Sea! The Sea! has two strengths. The first is the fact (slightly surprising in the patriotic context) that a fifth of the poems are translations. This introduces the British reader to a wealth of unfamiliar writing about the sea, from parts of Yehuda Halevi’s 12th century Hebrew On the Sea to Sorley Maclean’s 20th century The Black Boat given with its Gaelic original. (Peter Jay writes that most of the translations are from French and Spanish, included “in a commemorative spirit” of Trafalgar. But as none of these poems relate to Trafalgar or even to war at sea, the point seems irrelevant.)

   The second strength is a number of poems in English which are unfamiliar, forgotten or unfashionable. Acquaintance or reacquaintance with them gives great pleasure: Psalm 107 in the King James version (“They that go down to the sea in ships”); Campbell’s patriotic Ye Mariners of England and Newbolt’s Drake’s Drum; Sargeant’s A Life on the Ocean Wave; one of the finest Anglican hymns,‘Eternal Father, strong to save’; The Owl and the Pussycat; Valery’s The Graveyard by the Sea of which there is no adequate translation (regrettably Wallace Stevens, who knew it, never turned his hand to translation); Durrell’s irreverent The Ballad of the Good Lord Nelson (Peter Jay explains that he found no reverent poems worth including); and Derek Walcott’s The Sea is History, both witty and awesome.

   At this point reviewers of anthologies usually mention some poems that are regrettably absent, but this has little purpose because every anthologist has to make choices; Peter Jay mentions other poems that he would have liked to include. In the event, The Sea! The Sea! is unsatisfying for two more fundamental reasons – the first particular, the second general and calling into question the value of any anthology of sea poems now and in the future.

   The particular problem is that the anthology is overshadowed by J D McClatchy’s Poems of the Sea published by Everyman in 2001. Peter Jay pays a generous tribute to this book and says that he avoided excessive duplication with it. The result is that McClatchy has the advantage of publishing first and trumps Jay again and again. McClatchy arranges his poems by theme so that each illuminates those before and after; Jay arranges his by chronological order of poet’s birth year – more appropriate to a historical survey which The Sea! The Sea! is not. For example, McClatchy includes a fair selection of sea shanties (or chanteys), but Jay just one, so that a whole tradition of work song, which fell silent with the coming of steam, is virtually unrepresented.

   Jay’s decision to avoid overlap means that McClatchy often has the better poems: Emily Dickinson’s Evolution is in the going and I started early as against Wild Nights! Wild Nights!; Whitman’s As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life as against In Cabin’d Ships at Sea; four Melville poems including Billy in the Darbies – the end of the unfinished Billy Budd and probably the last words that Melville wrote – as against A Requiem for Soldiers Lost in Ocean Transports.

   And McClatchy’s overall selection is more memorable. In the 20th century, for example, he has great poems like Eliot’s Marina, Lowell’s Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket, Stevie Smith’s Not Waving But Drowning and Plath’s Full fathom five which Jay does not, as well as some others that Jay includes.

   The more general problem is that a third of Jay’s poems were written in the 20th century – the century in which the sea ceased to be central to human experience. In 1900 people had to cross the sea to reach other continents and all imports came by sea – not entirely without risk as some ships sank every year. Knowing since Trafalgar that wars could be lost at sea, maritime nations spent the greater part of their military budgets on their navies. Fish provided much of the world’s protein, caught by trawlers on which not a few men died each year. The depths of the sea were mysterious; they might contain cities, lost or peopled with alien life, and monsters might rise from them.

   In 2006 everyone crosses the world by air. Wars are won by bombing whether from planes or by missiles. Trawling is virtually defunct; fishing is done by huge factory ships which hoover the waters below, leaving increasing tracts of sea lifeless. The depths have been plotted and their currents – steady as conveyors – are now understood to be vulnerable. Oil rigs are to be followed by offshore wind farms and shores lined with wave-power generators. The sea is on the way to becoming an industrialised desert, crossed on regular routes by cruise liners and by vast container ships and oil tankers with few crew and therefore almost no superstructure – all massively stabilised and guided by satellite navigation. Ports worldwide have been converted into conference centres, expensive waterside residences and marinas from which people sail boats – a recreational activity not significantly different from flying small propeller-driven aircraft.

   In upshot, the sea has become marginal to human life and so has lost its appeal to the human imagination. Always excepting Derek Walcott for whom the sea is central to Caribbean experience, it no longer serves as an adequate symbol, whether of God’s power (The Seafarer, Yehuda Halevi, Hopkins’ Wreck of the Deutschland), human folly (The Ancient Mariner, The Convergence of the Twain, The Quaker Graveyard), extreme human feeling (Cowper’s Castaway, Matthew Arnold, Not Waving But Drowning, Plath’s Full fathom five) or ecstatic meditation (Valery’s Graveyard by the Sea, Stevens’ Idea of Order and Sea Surface Full of Clouds).

   Jay is left with a large number of poems which have the sea as their subject but do not engage their writer intensely – that are occasional poems therefore. Of these, W S Graham’s Falling into the sea is striking, as is Christopher Reid’s oblique meditation on the sexual desires that transformed dolphins and dugongs into mermaids(Mermaids Explained). Most of the poems attempt to describe the sea and, explicitly or implicitly, its effect on the writer. The results are variable. Gavin Bantock’s A New Thing Breathing combines new and traditional imagery in a way that finally seems forced and unconvincing:

     tough, tugging bitch with vicious voice
     snatching at sirens’ long locks and otherwise long lost songs;

     hoarse virgin, purest of all whores,
     unsated dustbin of sundry lands, spittoon,
     eager coffin of sea-dogs and the dead at sea…

while Alice Oswald’s early Sea-Sonnet shows her extraordinary originality of thought and language, imaging the sea as a vast extension of water’s activity on land:

     The sea crosses the sea, the sea has hooves;
     the powers of rivers and the weir’s curves
     are moving in the wind-bent acts of waves.

     And then the softer waters of the wells
     and soakaways – hypostases of holes
     which swallow up and sink for seven miles…

   Oswald has occasionally returned to the sea, as in the finale of Dart and elsewhere, and this is probably as much as we can hope –that poets will sometimes write about the sea as they do about mountains or deserts. The Sea! The Sea! may turn out to be the last anthology that, owing to the circumstances of its publication, claims a special importance for the sea.