A Thought of the Sea

Notes from The Poems of Felicia Hemans (Project Gutenberg #66785), largely Mrs Hemans's own.

1. Stanza 1, line 15 [The sight and sound of the sea were always connected in her mind with melancholy associations; with “Doubt, and something dark. Of the old sea some reverential fear;” with images of storm and desolation, of shipwreck and sea-burial: the last, indeed, was so often present to her imagination, and has so frequently been introduced into her poetry, that any one inclined to superstitious presentiments might almost have been disposed to fancy it a foreshadowing of some such dark fate in store either for herself or for some one dear to her. These associations, like those awakened by the wind, were perfectly distinct from any thing of personal timidity, and were the more indefinable, as she had never suffered any calamity at all connected with the sea: none of those she loved had been consigned to its reckless waters, nor had she ever seen it in all its terrors, for the coast on which her early years were passed is by no means a rugged or dangerous one, and is seldom visited by disaster. “Are all these notes in thee, wild wind! these many notes in thee? Far in our own unfathom’d souls their fount must surely be; Yes! buried, but unsleeping there, thought watches, memory lies, From whose deep urn the tones are poured through all earth’s harmonies.” In one of her later sonnets on this subject, a chord is struck which may perhaps find an echo in other bosoms:-- ----“Yet, O blue deep!” etc. The same feeling is expressed in one of her letters:--“Did you ever observe how strangely sounds and images of waters--rushing torrents, and troubled ocean-waves, are mingled with the visionary distresses of dreams and delirium? To me there is no more perfect emblem of peace than that expressed by the Scriptural phrase, ‘There shall be no more sea.’” How forcible is the contrast between the essential womanliness of these associations, so full of “the still, sad music of humanity,” and the “stern delight” with which Lord Byron, in his magnificent apostrophe to the Sea, exults in its ministry of wrath, and recounts, as with a fierce joy, its dealings with its victim, man! ----“The vile strength he wields For earth’s destruction, thou dost all despise, Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies, And send’st him, shivering in thy playful spray, And howling, to his Gods, where haply lies His petty hope in some near port or bay, And dashest him again to earth--there let them lay.” Childe Harold.