Cranston High School - Cranstonian Yearbook (Cranston, RI)

F511 . YJ QRANSTON was merely a background for tales about life upon it The Old English poems usually represented the ocean as awe inspiring and terrifying In an Anglo Saxon poem The Seafarer an old sailor emphasizes its coldness and cruelty He sings of the 1ce cold waves he ice cold sea he icy feathered birds and the 1ce chains that wulf the dangers and the treachery of the sea are prominent In telling of an adventure Beowulf says Thus we two were in the sea for the space of five nights t1ll the flood the tossing of waves coldest of Weathers drove us apart and a fierce north wind beat down upon us rough were the waves As time advanced there was no radical change in th1S poetry Poets did not as one would expect repre sent the sea as magnetic and 1rres1st1 ble drawing men forth to adventure Spenser seems 'to express the general feeling of his day in the Faerie Queen : Better safe port than be in seas distrest. Even the immortal Shakespeare sel- dom wrote of it. It came into his poetry usually incidentally. In The Tempest for example the sea was necessary just as in Othello Venice was necessary. As a lyric of the sea however, what could be more beau- tiful than Ariel's song in "The Tem- pes "? "Full fathom five thy father lies: Of his bones are coral made: Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange." More often he cursed the sea than 7 praised it as again in The Tem pest we find Had I been any god of power I would Have sunk the sea within the earth or e er It should the good ship so have swallow d and The fraughting souls w1th1n her After the defeat of the Spanish Armada a wave of patr1ot1sm swept England Songs and poems sprang up everywhere praising England and th1s spirit IS shown 1n Bishop Stills The Spanish Armada Though cruel Spam and Parma With heathene legions come O God arise and arm us We ll die for owre home' But though the poets told of great deeds and of sailor life they still failed to write of the beauty and ap peal of the sea The time had not yet come when they felt that they dared to break away from the narrow limits set by their predecessors In the latter part of the eighteenth century the Romantic movement greatly changed English literature. Poetry broke away from the bonds of the previous centuries and became free natural and imaginative. With this change came a new appreciation of nature. Byron Coleridge Shelley Keats and Wordsworth describe the sea in most picturesque terms. Byron pictures its mystic charm in Childe Harold : There is society where none intrudes By the deep Sea, and music in its roar' I love not man the less, but Nature more." Keats describes it in a calm: "Often 'tis in such a gentle temper found That scarcely will the smallest shell Be moved for days from where it sometime fell." Many poets have treated the sea as symbolic of the Creator's power. In "Childe Harold" we find: MllllllllllllllllllllllIlllllllllhl ' 5 lllllllllllllllIlllllllllllllllllllly 5, f ' ' ' O I 1 ' it 1 t .I ty tg . E fettered his feet. Again, in "Beo- her Sailgfsf heroism-, Something, OE E t '