A great many writers have described the sea in poetry and prose. Only a few, however, have done so in a way that makes one imagine and feel its mysterious beauty and power. The words they used seem fresh and out of the ordinary. They stick to the mind.
Here are seven gems from seven authors:
Like a beautiful and unscrupulous woman, the sea of the past was glorious in its smiles,
irresistible in its anger, capricious, enticing, illogical, irresponsible; a thing to love, a thing to fear. It cast a spell, it gave joy, it lulled gently into boundless faith; then with quick and causeless anger it killed.
— Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands (1896)
I am the gate toward the sea: O sailor men, pass out from me!
I hear you high on Lebanon, singing the marvels of the sea.
The dragon-green, the luminous, the dark, the serpent-haunted sea,
The snow-besprinkled wine of earth, the white-and-blue-flower foaming sea.
— James Elroy Flecker, “Gates of Damascus”, The Collected Poems of James Elroy Flecker (1916)
The unsheltered sea heaves and heaves and blanches into foam. It sets me thinking of some tied-up monster straining at its bonds, in front of whose gaping jaws we build our homes on the shore and watch it lashing its tail. What immense strength, with waves swelling like the muscles of a giant!
— Rabindranath Tagore, Glimpses of Bengal (selected from the letters of Sir Rabindranath Tagore, 1885 to 1895)
The little narrow, crooked town of Dover hid itself away from the beach, and ran its head into the chalk cliffs, like a marine ostrich. The beach was a desert of heaps of sea and stones tumbling wildly about, and the sea did what it liked, and what it liked was destruction. It thundered at the town, and thundered at the cliffs, and brought the coast down, madly.
— Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
Listen to that bitch—the sea—that maker of widows.
— Zorba the Greek (1964 film)
It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea.
— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851)
God! he said quietly. Isn’t the sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks! I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look.
— James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
~ Barista Uno
