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SHAKESPEARE AND THE SEA:a

BY ALFRED NOYES

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England a Prospero's Island in HisDay---Music of :the Waves

Pervades His PoetryWritten for .Tns New Yolx TIMes. Copyright, 1916, by The New York Times Company.

"Everythintf that heard hit play,

Even the billows of the sea,

Hung their heads and then lay by."

0 "NE of the secrets of the power of theE llsabe'tt.in age in poetry lies in

0: the combination of two facts, thefact that England was a small and

oiltd island and the fact that the sea sur-! rounding( her had suddenly assumed an as-pect of almost daily deepening mystery.Never before in the history of the worldhad there been such a combination,

There had been legends and fairy talesof happy islands where men walked withgods as with their elder brothers; butnever before had there been such a reve-lation of miraculous realities. For herewas discovery on discovery of unlmaginedoceans and continents. Veil after veil waswithdrawn, only to make more mysteriousthe veils beyond. It was as if men weresailing out into the vastness of the Eternal.

Never before had It been possible to sit ina tavern and hear from the lips of those whohad sailed beyond the utmobt limits of theOld World that the fairy tales were Infinite-ly less marvelous than the truth. It was anage of real presences. and England had be-come a Prospero's Island by virtue of themighty presence of the sea. Seamen cameback like Lazarus from the grave, buttheir lips were not even sealed and theyheld the Bread of Life in their hands. Itwas as if men had suddenly discovered thattheir earth was. after all, not a thing ofmake-believe, a dust-bin of customs andcreeds. but a real island floating in the realmystery of an infinite heaven.

It was' seriously discussed In the littleblack taverns,. "at the latter end of a sea-coal fire." whether men might not sailstraight up to the Gates of Paradise. TheBible and the Map. in lHakluyt's phrase,liad,opened doors for them. But, for thegreater Intellects of th-' time. it meant aneven more vivid realixation of the Isolationof their little hearth-fires in an unfathom-able universe. It meant a spiritual voyagethrough an immeasurable abyss of dark-ness In quest of a spiritual Cathay.

That "strangeness " which Bacon. longbefore Walter Pater. had proclaimed as oneof the qualities of beauty, was nothingmore or less than the gleam of the treasurethat'the galleons of these great spiritualndventurers Brought back from worlds be-yond the world.

The exquisite poem of Drayton, "Tothe Viret"ian Voyage," combines In itselfboth asB"lc»t&s, the outei' and the innerbeauty of this fine quest. But it one

searches the Elizabethan poets for workdealing directly with the sea as a subjectin itself, it is more than a little surprisingto find how rarely they approach It inthat way. The influence of the sea upontheir poetry was as great as its influenceupon the City of London. But you do notlind either of them very salt.There Is no contemporary work of Im-

portance dealing with the Armanda.There are few poems even remotely cop-

nected with the seafaring life of the time,There are songs, of course, like the dialogueIn Dowland's " Book of Airs." in whichNeptune and the gods of the wind areparaded in what might be called lyricalmasques rather than poems. There areinnumerable conventional sea - picturesamong the sonneteers, many of themImitations of the French and Italian poetsrather than original poems of the sea. Butthere are very few Elizabethan lyrics thatdeal directly with the subject, very feweven so vital as the verses by Surrey-the"complaint of a woman for her absentlover, being upon the sea."

The sea, in fact, has been used by almostall the English poets incidentally, as animage, a symbol, a means of " represent-ing much in little." The function of poetry,as described by Wordsworth in the greatpassage from which those four words arequoted, has been carried out chiefly by twomeans of expression-rhythm, which Intro-lduces law Into chaos and has its counter-part In all the arts and in all creation: andImagery, a means of, representing thosethings which are beyond the direct reach ofour minds, representing occasionally eventhose things which we call divinqe. The sea.with its tidal rhythms, its measured waves,its Immeasurable horizons, has been one ofthe chief images used by the English poetsin the exercise of this great art.

It is in this more subtle way that the seahaP most profoundly influenced our islandliterature and lent some of Its deepesttones to the music of our poetry. Forthough England herself. in almost all herphases-political, social, religious, and ar-tistic-is a daughter of the sea. "lulledwith sea-sounds in a thousand caves andlit with sea-shine to her Island lair," thephysical aspect of the matter would haveno vital significance for us In literatureIf it were not for the fact that her poetshave caught sight, acriss her grayhorizons, of a vaster and more signifi-cant sea; that sea from which, in adeeper sense than they knew in Greece orRome, beauty herself was born; that seawhich Keats, not C'ortez. beheld from the

mount of vision. "Hence," cried Words-worth, child as he was of the inland lakes:Hene,o, in a season of calm weather,

OurTh he so siund t of that immortal seaWhich brought us hither:greate In p momerynt travel thd, whether ofAndthe ses, or the mIporting on the shoreAnd hea, the mighty waters, rolling ever-

more.The sound of that sea is heard in all the

greatest poetry of England, whether ofthe lakes, or the mountains, or the coast.The se, in that vast, symbolical sense,rolls an infinite horizon round our Englishpoetry, just as the stars round off thethree divisions of the Divine Comedy.

The greatest of all poets, Shakespeare,holds that position because he was ableto show us muore things than any otherman in their eternal aspect; and, by doingthis, to double the truth, double the real-ity, of the human pageant that he passesbefore us. More than that of any otherpoet his music has caught the very ca-dence of that unfathomable sea whosewaves are years, Of the sonnets It mightalmost be said that they are themselveswaves In that eternal element, They areso much at one with it that we cannot tellthe music of the sea from their own.Like as the waves make toward the pebbled

shore,So do our minutes hasten to their end:

Each changing place with that which goesbefore,

In sequent toll all forwards do contend,Nativity, once in the main of light,

Crawls to maturity, wherewith beingcrowned,

Crook{d eclipses 'gainst his glory fight,And Time that gaye doth now his gift

confound." Like as the waves! ' The waves them-

selves are allowed only a single line; butwhat a sea-picture is this, and how themusic of the sea informs every syllable.every cadence; so that the only possiblemusical accompaniment to the whole wouldbe one played by the ocean. This music lpcarried on through sonnets In which thereis no direct reference to the sea at all, butthe cadence is unmistakable.

"When in the chronicle of wasted time."he says, and we see the waves wastinathemselves in foam once more. Just as inthe end of Arnold's " Dover Beach," whenthe poet has left the sea for the loftiertheme, we hear the clashing of waves inthat darker world, " swept with confusedalarms of struggle and fight, where Igno-rant armies clash by night"; so Shake-speare uses the music of the sea to repre-sent those processes of change which makeof the whole physical universe a flowingtide of colored shadows. A modern critichas touched this continual vanishing awayof ourselves and the universe with some-thing of the morbid beauty of a fever: bu;only at the price of that cruelty, that In-justice to ourselves and the universewhich may be said to lurk like a disease inthe heart of all the aesthetics of pessimism!

Walter Pater approached this aspect ofthe universe from the critical side. Shake-speare has the wider and deeper creativitview. Over and over again. in his son-

nets, we feel that in the midst of all theseflowing tides he has within himself someabding certainty, though even for him iimay be expressble, too great even forsuch definition as Shelley could give it.The one rem t, thke many chanpe andpass. He doubts and fears; but thesedoubts and fears and sorrows are a kinglycrown, a divine crown, that he would notresign for all the pleasures that tickle thepalate of the modern aesthete, What anebb and flow, making a sound like thun-der, everlastingly, there islan the aqtipho -nal cadences of the following:

When I have seen by Time's fell hand 4efacedThe rich-proud cost of outworn buried age;

When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed

And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;When I have seen the hungry ocean gain

Advantage on the kingdom of the sore,And the firm soil win of the watery main;

Increasing store with loss and loss withstore:

Wthen I have seen such interchange of stae,Orkindle state itself confounded to decay,

Ruiners ike thath tautupht me thu to ruminateThat t ll eaucomety and take my love away,

This nthouht is a a death, which cannotighies o. po the te

Butalso: but have did not whch iat thfear to loyone,And ever and again in the darkfless he

kindles som e great beaon or tormtossemariners like that triumphant hundreand sixteenth sonnet, givins his owns answerto their age-long question-Sowo wuth tk14rage shall beauty find a pica, whose actios4. no stronger than d flower For thismightiest of all poets was the tepderestalso; but he did not to thalt there. mieyondthe music of the sea. beyond the mussiof l our mortality and the eternal ote ofsadness that Sophocles heard upon theAegean, he worthfinds his own auswer, hisown reconciliation, and utters It in themajor key:Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admithin himpediments, Love is not loveWhich alters hothen it alteration finds

ut bendar with te reve r to remove.Oh noever writ s an everfixed mark,

That ooks on tempests and is Inever ehaken;It is that great sea-mary wanering bark,efore

Whose worth's unknown, although hisheight be takenhe .

Love's not Time's attitude though roy lips anvere,cheeks

Within his b ending sickle's compass cometLove altetrys ot with hi brief hour ant ear

Buhas not bears it out even to the edge ot doom,If this be etror and upon me proved,I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

With esuch music as this in oureaers, andwith that great sea-mark towering beforeus. we can understand what Victor Hug*meant by his elaborate comparison ofShakespeare with the sea, and by his con-

eluesion; to look upon the soul of thaketspeare to filook upon the Ocean. poetry

It is in this at sometioward the universe,then, this constant realization of the factthat poetry is concerned with what earhas not heard and eye has not seen, thatthe greatness of the art of Shakespeareresides. It is in 'his use of sea music, ofsea imagery, to bring his readers intotouch with thoughts that would otherwisebe beyond the /eaches of any soul, that weare to find his greatest sea poetry. Heuses the sea sometimes as an image for

the universe itself, for all' that isto outsidethe bounds of the individual poul. He doesthis, for instance, in Hamlet, where he de-bates whether he shall " take arms againsta sea of troubles," and itn Pericles, wherehe cries:

Put me to present pain;Lest this great sea of Joys rubidng upon meO'erbear the shore of my moaity,An4 drown me with their sweetness.

Throughout the work, of 8hakespeare,howeyer, we are never very far away fromevep the material sea; never, one mightsay, out of earshot of it. There are, ofcourse, the obvious cases like the prologueto " Henry V.," which gives us almost theonly contemporary picture of an Eliza-bethan fleet:

Suppose that ou have seenThe well-appointed king, at Hampton pier,

mbark his royalty; and his bravy fleetWith silken streamers, the young Photbus

sfanning.'

Play with your fancies and In themdo behold

y on the hempen tantckle ship os climbing,For the shrilappears whistle which 4.th order giveTo sounds confused; behold the thraden

Born e with th e nvisible and creeping windtDraw of the huge bottoms throuh the fur-

rowed searevival. ne may hatinguess thurge: Oh, do but think

Yothee stand upon the rivaf avinge and bareholdA city on the inconstantd recebillows dancing;For so appears this fleet majestical.

More vital,' and certainly one of themost vivid, of sea-farewells is the picturen tat aCymbellne thr ofugh the sailint of en'slovei'-one of the very few instances of the

nded, in andirectly poetry before the romanticrevival. One may hazard a guess thatthese scenes of waving and farewell fromvanishing ships and receding shores--m-mepts that all through the history of Eng-land have plucked at the islander's heart-strings-have directly influenced the de-velopment both of seascape and landscapein English poetry.

Imoges--I would thou grewst unto the shoreso' the haven,

And questlon'dast every sail: If he shouldwrite,

And I not have it, 'twere a paper lost,As offer'd mercy is. What was the lastThat he spake to thee?

P'is(fltO It was his queen, his queen!Imo.-Then waved his handkerchief?Pts,-And kiss'd it, Madam.niqv.--enseless linen! happier therein than I!

And( that was all?Pis,-No, madam; for so long

As he could make me with this eye or earDistinguish him from others, he did keepThe deck, with glove, or hat. or handker-

chief,Still waving, as the fits and stirs of 'sa indCpuld beat express how slow his ,op!

sali'd on,How swift his ship.mno.-Thou shouldst have ma4e himAs little as a crow, or less, ere leftTpafter-eye him.

/I',I-Madam, so I did.lmo.-i would have broke mine eye-strings;

crack'd them, butTp look upon him, till the diminutionOf np ".' had pointed him sharp as my

ay. r.i;lw'd him. till he had melted fromTe iinaillness aoa gnat to air, and thenHave turn'd mine eye and wept.

'Tennyson had undoubtedly very carefully

studied the pa from "Cymbellne."borrows the very phrasing of of one line todescribe a very different kind of distance"where all the starry heavens of spaceare sharpened to a needle's end." it is re-called by the sea distance at the close ofthe Marte d'Arthut, too, where the hull be-coe"n "one black dot aga~nst th vergie ofd- wn "; and again by the exquisite comingand ing of sails in the later song:

Fresh as the first beam glittering on the sailThat brings our friends up from the under-

world;Sad as the last that reddens over oneThat sinks with all we love below the

verge * * .

This is not dramatic. It is not con-cerned with the "moving accident." Itbears the burden of no moral or politicalrevolt or acquiescence. It is "art for art'sake," thi very thing that the a pretendsto require, and in this case it to simplyquiet and beautifully painted seascape, de-veloped from the earlier seascape of Shake.spear. The passage in "Cymbeline " hasa less vivid parallel in the second part" King Henry VI.," this time a picture fromthe deck of a ship:

As far as I could ken thy chalky cliffs,When from thy shore the toempe t beat us

back,I stood upo the hatches in the torm,And when the dusky sky began to robMy earnest-gaping sight of thy land's view,I took a costly jewel from my neck,A heart it was, bound in with diamonds,And threw It towards thy land: the ase re-

ceived It,And so I wish'd thy body might my heart;And even with this I lost fair Englanld'

viewAnd bid mine eyes be packing with myAnd call'd them blind and dusky sptlFor loing ken of Albion's wohe o

Hut the Influence of the sea upon Shake-speare is least shown by the passagesIn which he deals directly with it. Farmore is it shown in the exquisite lineswith which Florizel woos Perdita, linesthat seem to reveal some subtle correspon-dence, some law of beauty that Is commonto this child of the sea and the waves thanhad refused to harm her, lines that seemIn their exquisite movement to share thtsecret of the waves, the tdes and the puls-ing of the human heart; in short, the *e-cret of rhythm itself:-What you doStill better* what Is done. When you speak,

sweet,I'4 have you do it ever: When you sing

I'd have you buy and sell so, so give thms,Pray so; and, for the ordering your ffTo sllg them, too; when you do dance I

wlsh youA wave of the sea, that you might ever do.

Nothing but that; move still, still so.And own no other function.

There is the essence of sea poetry, an es,sence not to be found in the mere fact thatShakespeare elsewhere used this or thatnautical phrase. This is the music which.as I said above, is to be heard throughmany of the sonnets and plays where asmention of the sea is made at all

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