Tides

Walking home along the Thames the other day, with the tide running strongly for the sea, I began to think about tides in poetry, inevitably suffused with images of dramatic events, mortality, and merely of inevitability and ancient rhythms. Here are a few of the things that came to mind - mostly poetry with a word about tides in it, but one poem which has almost nothing to do with tides. And I promise you a whole posting on tides without mentioning Canute!

Let me know if tidal images conjure up other writing for you.

Time and tide wait for no man is a common enough saying, but I can find little agreement on its source, though it is quoted from the fourteenth century onwards in different forms.  Most authorities I have found (learned professors, help me here!) attribute it to Chaucer in the Clerk's Tale, although tide is not actually mentioned:

"For thogh we slepe, or wake, or rome, or ryde,

Ay fleeth the tyme; it nyl no man abyde" .

Shakespeare (Julius Caesar) next claims my attention, in a quotation (never will you see the barbarous bastard noun "quote" here) that is so well known as to be cliched, yet is such a strong and moving image:

"There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries".

I wanted to end with Kipling, but personal considerations dictate otherwise - and his lines about Butser always make me think of Chesterton's Ballad of the White Horse, which is a long, self indulgent (but rather fun) paean on English history - and which starts with these fine lines:

Before the gods that made the gods
Had seen their sunrise pass,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was cut out of the grass.

Kipling settled in Sussex (his house at Bateman's is well worth a visit  from a literary point of view, but is also a lovely house and garden in superb countryside) and became a Sussex man through and through.  Here, in Rewards and Fairies (see Midsummer's Day on this site on 24 June), he reels off the names of the downs, the chalk whale hills of the south, ending with Butser in Hampshire (and the highest of the Downs, a fact that Kipling does not draw attention to):

THE WEALD is good, the Downs are best –
I'll give you the run of 'em, East to West.
Beachy Head and Winddoor Hill,
They were once and they are still.
Firle Mount Caburn and Mount Harry
Go back as far as sums 'll carry.
Ditchling Beacon and Chanctonbury Ring
They have looked on many a thing,
And what those two have missed between 'em
I reckon Truleigh Hill has seen 'em.
Highden, Bignor and Duncton Down
Knew Old England before the Crown.
Linch Down, Treyford and Sunwood
Knew Old England before the Flood;
And when you end on the Hampshire side –
Butser's old as Time and Tide.
The Downs are sheep, the Weald is corn,
You be glad you are Sussex born!

With a bound we are in the nineteenth century, with "The western tide crept up along the sand" with sinister effect, in Charles Kingsley's Sands of Dee, when Mary went to call the cattle home, with such fatal and (it must be said) melodramatic consequences. A moody and affecting poem, which loses its emotional appeal on your seventeenth birthday, but whose word music is still haunting.  Then to John Masefield's Sea Fever, which will ever have an especial place in my mind, in excess of its considerable poetic virtues, as it was a favourite of my mother's and read by a very close friend at her funeral just over a year ago:

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,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way, where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.

Comments

[Harriet]

Sea Fever was a favourite of my mother's too -- she used to recite it to me when I was little.

[Karen]

I take it you know John Ireland's setting of "Sea Fever". Most beautiful music.