 |
| August 2009 |
| Billie Silvey |
 |
| The Poetry Of Sailing |
 |
 |
| The legend of The Flying Dutchman is the tale of a Dutch vessel which sank off the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of Africa in 1641. The captain didn’t want to die, so he screamed, “I will round this cape if I have to keep sailing ‘til Doomsday.” Numerous people, including a German submarine crew in World War II, a future monarch of England, and various holiday makers claim to have seen the ghostly ship. |
 |
 |
 |
| Most of us first encountered the poetic language of sailing as children, in the nursery rhyme about "Wynken, Blynken and Nod," who sailed off to sleep in a wooden shoe. The poem was published in 1889 by Denver journalist Eugene Field. The first few lines and an illustration were engraved on a silver cup given to my mother when I was born. |
| You were probably in school, as I was, when you first read Emily Dickinson’s poem that begins, “There is no frigate like a book.” A favorite of librarians, it wasn’t published until 1924, 38 years after her death. The reclusive Dickinson was a prolific writer, though fewer than a dozen of her nearly 1,800 poems were published in her lifetime. Their short lines and unconventional capitalization and punctuation were far from the contemporary definition of poetry, though now she is recognized as an American master. |
| Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s longest poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, was published in 1798 in Lyrical Ballads. It is the story of a sailor who returns from a long sea voyage where his ship has been blown off course to the shores of Antarctica by a storm, rescued by an albatross, then becalmed in the tropics. The mariner, forced to watch his shipmates die, is blamed for their fate and forced to wander the earth telling the tale. |
| We generally have to grow older before we appreciate the words of Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar." It was published just three years before the death of the famous Victorian in his 1889 collection Demeter and Other Poems. |