By The Sea, On A Winter’s Morning

If you were to describe the sea, what would you say?

How do you capture the sea? How do you capture her sight, her sounds, her smells with words, in mere strings of alphabets?

Can you?

Keats spoke of “eternal whisperings” and “shadowy sound”, but that’s only half of it. The sea is a “treacherous smiler, with teeth of milk”, “a savage beguiler, in sheathings of silk” for Wylie.

To Hardy she is a ceaseless babbler on a clear-sunned March day, to Longfellow a voice out of the silence of the deep, to Tennyson dead claps of thunder heard through the living roar.

A grey vault, Walcott called her. No, a boundless blue with whistling winds and the music of waves, said Whitman. No, no, a cool murmurous grave, Parker wrote.

For Caroll the cold cold sea was an object of hate (like “a spider, a ghost, the income-tax, gout, an umbrella of three”), a ceaseless howl of a dog beaten day and night. Kipling loved her. The sight of “salt water unbounded”, her “heave and the halt and the crash”, her “menaces swift as her mercies”, he loved all of her.

As do I. Like Keats (but not Caroll) and a million others after him, I sat by her side and thought of thoughts I could steal to capture something that has always frightened and fascinated me.

Failing, I lay back and let her sounds soak into me under a cold February sky.