Sea Chanties In The 19th Century

In sailor circles, the location is only noteworthy for its high rolling waves. At Whiskey 601, the giant swells are omnipresent and everlasting, and when you are trapped on a navy ship the situation is inescapable. Whiskey-601 was a seasick sailor's nightmare. In navy circles, even the strongest-stomached seamen would groan when they would be told that the ship was headed for “Whiskey”.

On whaling vessels during this time period, captain’s wives were generally the only females allowed onboard. Pregnancies were not uncommon; when a whaling wife went to sea, it was no surprise for her to come back pregnant or with one or more children! In fact, if a captain could not make port in time for the birth, they would have to deliver the baby themselves--much like Captain Charles Nicholls of the Sea Gull and Captain Peter G. Smith of the Young Hector (123). Other females who were occasionally allowed onboard were the wives of the first and second officers,

In the short story “Sea Oak,” George Saunders presents a family that is struggling with life in the poor neighborhood of Sea Oak. The narrator works as a male stripper in Joysticks, run by Mr. Frendt. The story also revolves around Auntie Bernie, who dies, resurrects, and dies again after advising the narrator, his sister Min, and their cousin Jade to adopt unorthodox and immoral means of making it in life. Two main themes that emerge in Saunders’ work are grief and loss that people suffer in life, and how the society teaches to deal with them, including the loss of a fruitful life, lack of wealth and success, as well as death.

My hands shook as I dove into the cool blue Atlantic. Unwilling to brave the brisk sea water, my 472 troop mates remained on the schooner. Three masts stretched high in the sky; their pristine white sails billowing above the booms. Aptly named, our ship, the Yankee, reminded us that we were misplaced sailors. The waves battered the hull as the captain lowered the anchor, its black iron slicing through salty white crests. At the anchor’s command, the rest of our crew lept like synchronized divers off of the ship and into the vibrant coral reefs surrounding Key West.

Remembering my adventures and call to mind the times I spent with my squadron, I started to think about the time my crew members and I set sail back to Ithaca. One day in the spring we came to Circe’s Island. On the way to the island we comprehended backbreaking tasks. The boat looked as it was rocking itself to sleep. “Row faster!” Odysseus shouted.

Santorini is a Greek island in the Aegean Sea. The island is also known as Thera, the English pronunciation of the island’s historical Greek name for the island “Thira”. Approximately 3500 years ago a series of volcanic eruptions devastated the island, its inhabitants and other Mediterranean Bronze Age civilizations1. The significance of these eruptions and their aftermath is that they had a severe environmental impact and may have led to the collapse of Bronze Age Mediterranean civilizations; moreover it may have been one of the largest volcanic eruptions in human history. This has led to some labelling the event as catastrophic. Figure 1 is a map of the Greece in the Aegean Sea. Santorini is located within a group of islands known as the Cyclades3. Due south of

Once, a Marsh Warbler sang like a woodwind, and I recalled him playing a medley of Goodman’s Sing Sing Sing and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. How the winged energy of his breath quieted the night. How daring I became in my dreams as I accompanied his notes over astonishing shores.

The story starts off talking about the fog horn. When I started to read this I had no clue what a fog horn was or what it was used for. A fog horn is a like a siren that goes off every fifteen minutes or so and it warns the ships that around it that there is land near and to watch out. It is normally put on a light house so that if you can’t see the light maybe you can hear the horn. Both the light and the horn are protective barriers for the ship captains. They protect them from running into the shore.

Hildebrand’s “The Masculine Sea” is found within the journal American Literary Realism; therefore, it can be concluded that her intended audience is: readers of American literature, realist literature, late 19th- and early 20th-century literature, and any overlaps of these. In this essay, Hildebrand uses The Awakening and other sources to argue for her thesis: Edna’s self-identifications of gender, race, and class contribute to how and why she commits suicide. There are two main themes of Hildebrand’s argument for gender identity influencing Edna’s death: Edna’s relationship with Adele, Madame Reisz, and the Colonel, and Edna’s understanding of art and the world. In exploring the gendered expectations and realities of The Awakening and of 19th-and 20th-century women, Hildebrand is engaging with a gender criticism perspective; similarly, because Hildebrand’s arguments are all about deconstructing binaries and unearthing hierarchies, there is also some poststructuralism going on. A final literary criticism that Hildebrand draws on, though more lightly than others, is postcolonialism; because Hildebrand makes connections between the racial and class expectations of masculinity that Edna possesses.

When people go on cruise trips, they intend to enjoy their time off to experience the sights and sounds of the open sea. In Annie Dillard’s Mornings Like This, she includes in her collection of found poems a poem that instills a similar sense of imagery that one would experience by the ocean. Her found poem, called “The Pathfinder of the Seas,” includes a variety of words and sentences that relate to sailing in the sea. She extracted them from other literature related to scientific research of the sky and the sea. The author brings together these distinct elements and structures them in a poem. By giving them a new home, she subsequently gives the work a new meaning. Dillard aims for the reader to find a new perspective on life through the

It’s easy to tell that the ocean is a mysterious and isolating place from all of the tragic tales we hear from sailors both real and fictional. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and an anonymous author’s “The Seafarer” are quite similar in that they both revolve around said tragic tales told by sailors. However, there seem to be more commonalities between their themes, tones, and messages rather than their seaward-bound settings. But before we can discuss these similar settings and deeper themes, we have to tackle their origins.

The ship swept through the roaring narrows between the rock of Scylla and the whirlpool of Charybdis, into the open sea, and the men, weary and heavy of heart, bent over their oars, and longed for

This seven part ballad begins as a tale told by an "ancient Mariner" who has grabbed hold of a Wedding Guest and captivates his will by sharing his wild tale at sea: "The Wedding-Guest stood still, And listens like a three years' child: The Mariner hath his will."  The ancient mariner tells us about a

In “The Seafarer”, a man recalls his travels aboard a ship travelling the winter seas and about all the hardships and suffering he was forced to endure. The first lines of the poem describe how deeply the setting affects the main

The ancient mariner and the albatross are common references in our language, and so are lines like "Water, water, everywhere, / Nor any drop to drink" (Taylor,1800). Coleridge's long, classic poem, first published nearly 200 years ago, still holds us with its "glittering eye," its story of the sailor locked in a living nightmare after he shoots an innocent albatross and watches his shipmates die all around him. Like Dore's famous nineteenth-century engravings for the poem, Young's illustrations in this large-size volume capture the mystery, the sense of the tiny ship in a huge space of ocean "Alone, alone, all, all alone, / Alone on a wide, wide sea"(…..). Unlike Dore, Young doesn't make the mistake of giving