BOOKS AND LITERATURE: About Books & Literature: To the Seas

From Erik Wander, your About Books & Literature Editor

What is it about summertime that draws us to beaches, to water, to the world's oceans? Is it simply that we want a refreshing dip or a cool breeze when the mercury climbs and the humidity stifles or is there something more elemental to the pull of the sea? "I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by," writes poet John Masefield in Sea Fever. And whether or not we feel we must go "to the seas again" this summer, many of us will if we're lucky enough to have the chance.

Call me Ishmael: Melville's 'Moby-Dick'

Herman Melville's 1851 story about the sailor Ishmael's voyage aboard the fictitious Nantucket whale ship Pequod with Captain Ahab at the helm would make most people's lists of greatest American novels. Symbolic, metaphorical and complex, Melville's masterpiece examines themes as fundamental as good and evil, among many others, and as significant as the existence of God. Ahab is single-minded in his drive to exact revenge on the vicious whale that on a previous voyage destroyed his boat and chomped off his leg, but what is Melville really up to in Moby-Dick?

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The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Published in the late 1700s in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, a collection by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, this milestone of a poem by Coleridge describes the experiences of a sailor who returns from a long voyage at sea. Widely read as a Christian allegory and to a lesser extent as an autobiographical portrait of a lonely Coleridge, the poem explores the psyche of the Mariner after he shoots down an albatross.

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An Old Man, a Great Fish, an Epic Battle

The Old Man and the Sea, published in 1952, was the last major fictional work by Earnest Hemingway published during the writer's lifetime and tells the story of a grueling battle between an aging Cuban fisherman and a giant marlin. After Santiago goes more than 80 days without catching a fish, he finally hooks the big one, but it takes him three days to defeat it. During that struggle and the one that ensues, readers find out that Hemmingway's Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner is much more than a simple story about an old man, a not-to-be-forgotten young boy named Manolin and a fight with a really big fish.

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Poems about Sailors, Seafarers

"The sea has been a powerful, inevitable presence in poetry from its ancient beginnings," our Poetry guides write in the introduction to this collection that includes Longfellow, Tennyson, Whitman and others. "It's a character, a god, a setting for exploration and war, an image touching all the human senses, a metaphor for the unseen world beyond the senses." Find some of your favorite poems among these classics about the sea.

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