poems and essay say on black sea port

• Poems & Essays
• Poetry in Motion NYC

Home > Poems > Black Sea

By Mark Strand

One clear night while the others slept, I climbed the stairs to the roof of the house and under a sky strewn with stars I gazed at the sea, at the spread of it, the rolling crests of it raked by the wind, becoming like bits of lace tossed in the air. I stood in the long, whispering night, waiting for something, a sign, the approach of a distant light, and I imagined you coming closer, the dark waves of your hair mingling with the sea, and the dark became desire, and desire the arriving light. The nearness, the momentary warmth of you as I stood on that lonely height watching the slow swells of the sea break on the shore and turn briefly into glass and disappear . . . Why did I believe you would come out of nowhere? Why with all that the world offers would you come only because I was here? From Collected Poems by Mark Strand. (Knopf, 2014). Copyright © 2014 by Mark Strand. Reprinted with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher.

‘Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening’ by Charlotte Smith — The Poem + Analysis

Below, you’ll find an analysis of the poem ‘Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening’ by Charlotte Smith. This is a beautiful, dark poem about how the things that seem attractive in life can sometimes lead us astray. Smith cleverly uses the metaphor of seeing ship lights at sea to demonstrate how something can sometimes make brief sense to us, yet still, turn out to be wrong in the long term. This poem is tailored towards GCSE and A Level students on CIE / Cambridge, WJEC / Eduqas, OCR, CCEA and AQA exam boards — but it’s useful for anyone trying to get to grips with the poem at any level.

Thanks for reading! If you find this resource useful, you can take a look at our full CIE poetry courses and English Literature .

To get a full PDF document of this poem analysis, click this link .

Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening (1798–1800)

Huge vapours brood above the clifted shore,

Night on the ocean settles dark and mute,

Save where is heard the repercussive roar

Of drowsy billows on the rugged foot

Of rocks remote; or still more distant tone

Of seamen in the anchored bark that tell

The watch relieved; or one deep voice alone

Singing the hour, and bidding “Strike the bell!”

All is black shadow but the lucid line

Marked by the light surf on the level sand,

Or where afar the ship-lights faintly shine

Like wandering fairy fires, that oft on land

Misled the pilgrim — such the dubious ray

That wavering reason lends in life’s long darkling way.

Charlotte Smith

Vapours — a substance that floats in the air — often something that has transitioned from liquid or solid into a gas, such as steam from water

Brood — think deeply, hang heavily

Clifted — covered in cliffs

Mute — unable to speak

Repercussive — rebounding or reverberating, echoing — also an adjective used to describe after-effect of something

Drowsy — sleepy

Billow — a floating, outward movement as when a sheet is caught by the wind

Rugged — rough

Remote — far away

Seamen — sailors or people that work at sea

Bark — boat

The watch — the person who keeps watch, a nightwatchman

Lucid — clear, made of light

Surf — the foam that breaks onto the shore from the sea

Fairy fires — will- o — wisps, glowing lights that appear over dark bogs/swamps that travellers used to think were guiding lights, but which often led people astray (thought to be caused by leaking gas on bogs / moors / swamps)

Misled — lead astray

Pilgrim — someone who makes a spiritual journey

Dubious — doubtful, suspicious, untrue

Wavering — wobbly, moving up and down

Reason — logic and the mind’s ability to make sense of the world

Darkling — growing dark or covered in darkness

STORY / SUMMARY

The story is set in a port (a place where ships come in from the sea to dock and harbour) on a dark evening. The speaker is sitting with a view of the port, looking out to sea. She can see a vapour ( sea mist) on top of the shore, surrounded by cliffs. It is getting dark and night is falling, it also becomes quiet. The only sound is the ‘roar’ of seawater crashing against rocks in the distance. And even further away, she can just about hear the seamen out at sea who are speaking loudly with the watchman, who is relieved of his duty as it is the end of the day and the striking of the bell which signals the end of the day, when the work on the ship is over.

There is one line that disrupts the blackness of the sea and beach: the white line from the foam of the waves. There are also ship lights shining in the distance at sea, the speaker observes that these are similar to the fairy fires on land that lead wandering travellers astray across dark marshes at night. The last two lines use a simile to explore the idea that these small fires — fairy fires and ship lights in the darkness — are similar to the way in which humans use logic and ‘reason’ to justify their actions — they may be acting in a way that makes sense to them, but their own capacity to fully understand the wider perspectives of life is flawed, and so this can lead to flaws in judgement too. She’s talking about how people can get obsessed with ideas that make them lose their way in life — the fire is a metaphor for an idea or belief that people might latch on to, but that doesn’t help them in the long run and only makes sense in the short term.

Check out our analysis of ‘Rising Five’ by Norman Nicholson

SPEAKER / VOICE

The poet uses a third person omniscient narrator who creates a gothic atmosphere through their dark descriptions of the port. The narrator is arguably ghost-like in the sense that she is reporting what is occurring but is not involved in anything. She is passive and does not have a physical presence or role in the situation. The literal description of staring out at a port during the evening turns at the end of the poem into a more philosophical and metaphorical thought, where she observes that the ship lights seem appealing but if a person were to travel towards them through the darkness, they would drown at sea. Furthermore, Smith presents the speaker as looking in on the scene from an outside perspective, which we could say is something she felt she had herself been doing for her whole life, looking at those who have accomplished great achievements in their lives whilst she was impoverished and imprisoned (see context for more info).

LANGUAGE FEATURES

Personification — “Brood” — the vapours that hover above the shore are given a dark, deep character — brooding has connotations of deep, heavy thinking, sometimes if one is in a reflective state of mind or if someone is angry or dissatisfied. The speaker herself is also in this pensive and contemplative mode, so we could say that this personification is a projection of her own state of mind and character.

”fairy fires, that oft on land /Misled the pilgrim” — the fires are personified through the verb ‘misled’, which implies that they deliberately intend to lead wanderers astray. This personifies them as having a mischievous character, seeming useful and friendly but turning out to be detrimental to the ‘pilgrim’ who travels through darkness. As these fires are compared to the glowing lights of ships on the dark sea, and both are used as a metaphor for ‘reason’, the conclusion of the poem is that ‘reason’ — the mind’s ability to make sense of the world — is equally tricky and misleading in nature and should not be fully trusted. We shouldn’t only rely on our own minds to interpret and understand the world.

Alliteration — “repercussive roar”, “rocks remote”, “lucid line”, “fairy fires” — a range of visual and auditory images use alliteration to draw attention to themselves and create a strong picture of the port in the reader’s mind. In particular, the fricative alliteration (‘l’ and ‘f’) throughout the second stanza create a sense of slipperiness and fluidity, showing how quickly reason can ‘waver’ or our perception of reality can shift.

Extended Metapho r — In the second stanza “Ship lights…darkling way”Just as a literal source of dim light leads to faulty navigation and doubt in one’s journey, a “wavering reason,” or unreliable thought processes can cast doubt in the long, uncertain journey of life.

‘Wavering reason’, changing your mind or going back and forth over a topic, is also echoed in the movement of the ocean waves — the last two lines change the tone of the poem to be less about nature and landscape, and more about philosophy and humanity

STRUCTURE / FORM

Sonnet — the poem is a Romantic Sonnet in form, a type of Shakespearean sonnet that has 14 lines in length and written in an ABAB rhyme scheme , with the final two lines harmonising in a rhyming couplet that provides a conclusion to the thoughts and observations of the rest of the poem.

Rhyme Scheme — ABABCDCDEFEFGG > ends in a couplet, which summarises the ideas of the rest of the poem > Just as a literal source of dim light leads to faulty navigation and doubt in one’s journey, a “wavering reason,” or unreliable thought processes can cast doubt in the long, uncertain journey of life.

Monosyllabic lexis – “one deep voice”, “strike the bell”, “dark and mute”, “marked by the light surf” — these single syllable words create a simplistic impression of the scene, using straightforward and basic descriptions to depict the landscape and humans within it

Volta — the second stanza begins ‘All is black shadow but the lucid line‘, switching from images of darkness to the pockets of light within the scene — the line of the surf of the sea waves creates a white strip along the shore of the beach, and then further out in the sea the poet observes the lights on the ships, showing humans at work in a time that is contradictory to the routine of nature — they create their own lights to see by when the world has turned dark. This focal shift also creates a shift in perspective — instead of the power of nature, the second stanza now focuses on the frailty and fallibility of humans

Passive observation of life is sometimes more important than active participation — the speaker is not doing anything in the scene, merely watching and thinking about what she can see. Her thoughts become personal and introspective, capturing the physical darkness of the scene and turning into psychological darkness towards the end. The poem seems to have a rather pessimistic attitude, in a sense saying that logic and reason that humans use to figure out their world and make important decisions is wrong. Yet, writing as a woman in the 18th century, a time when men were thought of as having the gifts of logic and reason whereas women were more emotional, we could alternatively interpret this to be a criticism of the patriarchal or masculine world in which Smith found herself — a world which she sees as highly flawed because it is based on false principles and ephemeral truths.

Man is weaker than nature — true to the Romantic nature of the poem, it explores the sense that men are far weaker than nature — our technologies such as ships and lights are far less powerful than the vast blackness of the sand and the sea, as well as the waves which ‘roar’ as they crash against the cliffs. There is a sense that humans should always stay humble and never forget that no matter how advanced we become, nature will always be far more vast and powerful than we could ever fully comprehend. Many writers at this time, Smith included, view nature as an expression of God’s work on earth, and so from their perspective to respect and be humbled by nature is also a way of respecting and being humbled by the higher power that created it, whose powers they view as far stronger than our own. There is also a sense of brutality and indifference of nature, and by extension the God that created it: Smith feels that nature does not care whether individual humans live or die — the metaphor of the ‘fairy fires’ references an old folk tale about will-o-wisps, gases that light up on marshes at night and seem to be comforting flames but actually lure wanderers to their doom, off the clear and stable paths into the bogs, where they become stuck or drown.

Fate — the poem has a very deterministic attitude to it, as it suggests that free will is a fake human construction that never truly works. In Smith’s opinion, if we accept our fate and allow ourselves to be governed by a higher power, or to just accept the chaos of the world that we are placed into, then we are at least working more in harmony with nature, rather than against it. Smith has quite a misanthropic perspective (she distrusts humans and their cognitive abilities), and so she feels that our ability to use reason is ‘wavering’ — it’s inconsistent and not always true, and therefore we should not rely upon our own mental powers to decide how to be and what to do in life, instead leaving this to fate.

Life is a spiritual journey — The concrete noun ‘ pilgrim’ has connotations of religiosity as pilgrims travel on spiritual journeys. By implying that humans are pilgrims, Smith suggests that we are all on a spiritual journey through life, and that the purpose of our lives is to arrive at a spiritual destination (in her opinion, heaven). Therefore, these smaller ‘fires’ that are short-lived insights which lead us astray are to be avoided, because they distract us from achieving our higher spiritual purpose.

• Charlotte Smith was born on 4th May 1749, she died on the 28th of October 1806. This poem was written between 1798 and 1800.
• Smith led a very tragic life  — she was born into a wealthy family and received a good education, but her mother died while she was young and her father was bad with money. She was forced to marry Benjamin Smith, a merchant’s son who was unfaithful to her and wasteful with money, unable to support her and their children properly. Smith described herself as a ‘legal prostitute’ because she had been essentially sold to her husband to fuel her father’s spending habits. Her husband spent time in debtors prison, and she moved in with him there — writing her first notable poems in that environment, she published them in a collection called ‘Elegiac sonnets’, which was popular and made enough money to get them out of prison. She eventually left her husband and turned to writing as a way to make money. 
• Romantic literature started in the late 1700s as a response to the strict Puritanical religious society that oppressed people’s strong feelings and prevented them from enjoying life — Romantics believed that feeling intense awe and respect for the beauty of nature was a way to enjoy God’s work on earth — they write about the powerful and sublime aspects of nature, but also its destructiveness and potential danger.
• Romantic sonnet  — Smith’s poem is a Romantic sonnet, which deals with typically Romantic themes such as the power of nature and the sublime, the awe that we feel when faced with the beauty of nature’s raw strength and brutality. Sonnets are usually love poems, but Smith refashioned and somewhat re-popularised the form by writing ‘Elegiac Sonnets’, which are about other strong emotions and conditions such as tragedy and death.
• Gothic  — the Gothic genre came after Smith, but she was a writer that heavily influenced its development and inspired the genre to be created. Gothic literature consists of explorations of the supernatural and the struggle of good vs evil, interest in ghosts, darkness, spirituality, ruins, decay, and thematic tensions, all of which can be seen in Smith’s own works. 
• Darkness — spiritual and physical
• The Sublime
• Romanticism
• Logic Vs Emotion
• Spirituality / Religion
• Human nature

POSSIBLE ESSAY QUESTIONS

How does the poem present the poet’s feelings about nature?

Discuss Smith’s exploration of spirituality throughout the poem.

In what ways does Smith use darkness as a metaphor in the poem?

Explore the ways in which Smith vividly conveys the image of the port.

How does Smith movingly capture a moment in time in ‘Written Near A Port’?

EXAMPLE ESSAY PLANS

The poet presents her Romantic feelings about nature, which shows it to be beautiful yet dangerous, by exploring, the power of the sea, the danger of the darkness and the trickery of the fairy fires. This is all accomplished by her exploring the beauty in Nature as God created it, highlighting her Romantic beliefs.

P1- Power of the sea- very strong, crashing into rocks (there is a roar which has connotations of a lion, strong and powerful) “repercussive roar/ of the drowsy billows”

P2- Isolation of the ship)- Nature can be a dangerous place when you’re on your own. The pitch black area adds fear, black has connotations of the unknown. The world can be a dark place, as the poet knows — having been to jail and a prostitute. “Still more distant tone” or “All is black shadow”

P3- The trickery of the fairy fires- explores how humans can be deceived by light, thinking that there is god where the light is. The appreciation for the light is shown, yet also that one must be careful and not be too greedy of the light or you could be harmed, e.g. following the lights at sea and then drowning. “such the dubious ray”. The rhyming couplet in the last two lines furthermore shows the danger of the fairy fires by highlighting it in a single couplet. The rhyme also connects the two images together through sound.

Smith depicts a vivid impression of the speaker sitting, passively observing a seascape in her Romantic sonnet ‘Lines Written Near a Port on a Dark evening’. She establishes a sense of the dark, brooding atmosphere of the port through the depiction of setting, as well as a sense of the fragility of human life through the characterisation of the sailors. Overall, through the volta in the second stanza the poem becomes more philosophical in tone, meaning that it not only captures a moment in time but also applies to life and humanity in general.

P1 > setting

Title of the poem sets the image and moment in time, detailed visual imagery sets the scene and demonstrates the setting

P2 > characterisation

Depiction of humans working on ships contrasts to the poet’s state as a passive observer in the scene

P3 > sense of spirituality

Philosophical ending makes the moment apply outside of time — captures more a feeling or realisation that she had at the time

Related Posts

The Theme of Morality in To Kill A Mockingbird

To Kill A Mockingbird Essay Writing – PEE Breakdown

Emily Dickinson A Level Exam Questions

Unseen Poetry Exam Practice: The Man He Killed

Poem Analysis: Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare

An Inspector Calls – Official AQA Exam Questions

The Dolls House by Katherine Mansfield: Summary + Analysis

An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge: Stories of Ourselves:

Robert Frost’s Life and Poetic Career

Edexcel IGCSE Poetry Anthology List

© Copyright Scrbbly 2022

• CALL: (415) 431-3717   Hours: 9AM-5PM PST. EMAIL: [email protected]
• PLANNING GUIDE
• LOCAL RESOURCES
• BEFORE DEATH
• AFTER DEATH
• SevenPonds Home

“Gone From My Sight” by Henry Jackson Van Dyke

Credit: 7-themes.com

The poem “ Gone From My Sight ” by Henry Van Dyke, a mid-19th century American poet, is an evocative and deceptively simple narrative about watching a ship sail out of a harbor into the vast, open sea. The poem opens:

I am standing upon the seashore. A ship, at my side, spreads her white sails to the moving breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength.

The object of the poem, the ship, is introduced here as strong and beautiful. Van Dyke refers to it as female; if the ship were human, she would be the very picture of health and vitality.

I stand and watch her until, at length, she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other.

Not being diminished in any way except by the narrator’s own perspective, she slowly disappears.

Then, someone at my side says, “There, she is gone.

Gone where?

Gone from my sight. That is all. She is just as large in mast,

hull and spar as she was when she left my side. And, she is just as able to bear her load of living freight to her destined port.

Her diminished size is in me — not in her.

Thus the ship remains strong and able, carrying precious cargo safety to its destination.

And, just at the moment when someone says, “There, she is gone,” there are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices ready to take up the glad shout, “Here she comes!”

And that is dying…

Henry Jackson Van Dyke (Credit: allpoetry.com)

Van Dyke was the son of a Presbyterian minister, so it is easy to assume that he had some sort of ancestral heaven in mind when he imagined the “other eyes… and other voices” waiting to greet the ship as she arrived on a distant, invisible shore. This interpretation requires the reader to accept the concept of heaven or an “otherworld”  in order to gain comfort from the poem. Within this context, the poem loses its meaning for those who don’t believe in life or consciousness after bodily death.

However, there is another feasible reading of the poem that offers another meaning and a different relationship between death, loss and memory. The narrator’s acknowledgement that the ship is diminished only by perspective opens the possibility of seeing her with the same eyes as those who are watching from the opposite shore. Remembering her stature, strength and beauty, the narrator retains the memory of her as she was. This suggests that, as we bid farewell to the dying body of a loved one, we welcome them into the richness of our living memory — not diminished but transfigured into an undying, ancestral story.

Regardless of what you believe about the afterlife, reincarnation or the Invisible World, it remains true that the dead are carried by the living; they actively contribute to weaving the tapestry of our collective story for as long as we remember them — their stories, their sorrows, their joys, and their hopes and prayers for us and generations to come. It can be helpful to remember this as we try to ease the dying time of a loved one. By letting them know they will not be forgotten, we, perhaps, can give them the freedom to move on.

This poem also reminds us to live our lives in a such a way we provide nourishment and guidance to those who we will not live long enough to meet.

13 Responses to “Gone From My Sight” by Henry Jackson Van Dyke

This reading brought me such comfort when I lost my older brother; likewise, at the time of our mother’s passing. I was with my mother as she took her last breath, and I said to her, “It’s okay, Mom, Sidney is waiting for you on the other side!” That painted such a lovely picture in my mind that I have never forgotten. And it helps me remember that, when it’s my turn to leave this earth, I can only hope my life will have had meaning for my friends and family still living, but that it will also be a joyous occasion when those who have gone before me shout, “Here she comes!”

Report this comment

My sister passed away two days ago. The hospice nurse gave me this poem. It really brought me peace and comfort. I will be reading it at her service.

Hi Mary Ann,

How wonderful that your hospice worker gave you that poem. Absolutely a lovely idea!

This is one of my most cherished images. But, surely, it matters whether we anchor it to the resurrection promises of Jesus? To disconnect it from the deep faith that gives Van Dyke this image is surely to diminish (if not completely eviscerate) the Hope expressed here. To see someone again (as Jesus promises) is very different from simply carrying someone’s precious memory with us. The poem draws its power from the conviction that what Jesus promises is actually true.

Yes, Jim Miller, I agree with you that for one to have the hope that the author expresses, it must be tethered to the truth of Jesus’ promises. My hope is solidly rooted in the fact that His promises are true and will never fail. I love the words of this poem, but without the foundation of Jesus as my Savior, they would be only sweet words. The truth of His promises ensure that I will join my loved one day, for eternity…a perspective that is much different than “hope” that the world holds.

This above all other poems and writings, is the single most comforting piece I read after my only child passed away. I read it from time to time when I need to feel better in those dark moments.

We love to hear such comments. Since it was comforting to you I hope your comment will be a light to make someone else aware of this poem so it can serve them as well. Thank you so much for sharing with us.

I was a Hospice social worker for years, and that poem was shared with me. I have given it to people many, many times. My Mother recently passed away, and sharing it with my Dad was a real blessing. I think that people who are dying need to have it close. The vision is beautiful…knowing that we will be greeted…just beyond words.

We really appreciate you sharing with us and our readers just how much this poem helped you and your dad. Isn’t it lovely! Poems like “Gone from my sight” are the reason we provide the content we do – we thank you!

Suzette, Founder

My best friend is in hospice as of this writing,, after fighting a valiant battle with stage IV cancer for almost 4 years. Her adult son is having a very difficult time trying to imagine a time where his mother won’t be a part of his life, like she’s always been. This is especially hurtful, since her Drs. say she is in her last days of life. I sent him this poem last night (which I had recited at my mothers funeral services 8 years ago), & he was so grateful & comforted when he read it, & then promised to read it at his mom’s services. I’ve always imagined that heaven is on the receiving shore, where our family & friends who have gone before us, are waiting to welcome our precious loved ones home, where no illness or injury will ever befall them, for all eternity. The words of this beautiful poem, change a somber event into a hopeful & uplifting one, which is so helpful to those who are suffering through the loss of a loved one.

Yes, I agree. I poem like this can help to ease the pain of loss, if only a little bit. I’m glad you found the post useful!

I work as a hospice aid and am currently going to school to become an RN. We give the book “Gone From My Sight” to each family to read. This book and poem are so important in helping explain the dying process. I am doing a paper for my English class and I am using this Poem.

I came across this poem for the first time yesterday, at the funeral of an old former merchant seaman friend of my wife. He was known to the vicar, and she merged the Good Samaritan into “Ken never met a stranger” – and he didn’t – the world was full of friends. But, there was this poem on the order of service … to be read by one of his son’s. I read it before the funeral started, turned to my wife and whispered “I couldn’t read this, because it is too personal and wonderful”. Later, the vicar asked “Guy, will you manage it” and he did. He wisely omitted the last 4 words. They were unnecessary. We all heard them inside.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

WELCOME TO OUR BLOG

Welcome to the sevenponds.com blog – a community-driven extension of sevenponds.com i hope you find comfort and community in the resources and stories featured here. i’m always happy to hear from readers and can be reached at [email protected] ., “marjorie” by taylor swift :  the superstar’s ode to her late grandmother is about living with – and grieving for – her legacy.

“The Night Where You No Longer Live” by Meghan O’Rourke :  A speaker asks their loved one questions about death and the afterlife

More Americans Can Look Forward to Living Past 100 :  The New England Centenarian Study can calculate your odds

• Definitions
• About SevenPonds
• Advertise with Us
• Terms & Conditions
• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy

A Short Analysis of Charlotte Smith’s ‘Written near a Port on a Dark Evening’

‘Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening’ is a sonnet by one of the great proto-Romantic poets of the second half of the eighteenth century, Charlotte Smith (1749-1806). Smith’s sonnets anticipate Romanticism partly because nature in her poetry is so often feared with an awesome power that verges on the terrifying: ‘life’s long darkling way’ is brooding and full of menace here.

Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening

Huge vapours brood above the clifted shore, Night on the ocean settles dark and mute, Save where is heard the repercussive roar Of drowsy billows on the rugged foot Of rocks remote; or still more distant tone Of seamen in the anchored bark that tell The watch relieved; or one deep voice alone Singing the hour, and bidding ‘Strike the bell!’

All is black shadow but the lucid line Marked by the light surf on the level sand, Or where afar the ship-lights faintly shine Like wandering fairy fires, that oft on land Misled the pilgrim – such the dubious ray That wavering reason lends in life’s long darkling way.

‘Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening’ is a sonnet whose title explains the location (we are near a sea-port or harbour) and the time of day (evening). The poem contains a number of features which would come to be associated with Romanticism, but we will come back to those in a moment.

Let’s analyse the poem section by section, summarising its content.

Huge vapours brood above the clifted shore, Night on the ocean settles dark and mute,

The word ‘clifted’ means ‘split’ or ‘fissured’: it’s related to the word ‘cleft’, i.e. cleaved or split in two. The shore or boundary between land and sea is uneven and rugged. There are no neat lines or perfect angles here, such as the earlier Augustan or neoclassical poets like Alexander Pope, earlier in the eighteenth century, would have praised. Romantics are drawn to the natural roughness and imperfection found among nature and the elements.

Talking of elements, those ‘vapours’ – the mists from the sea – are ‘Huge’, as if they are on the verge of encompassing everything, making the poet’s view even more messy and unclear. There is an absence of both sight and sound: the night, as it settles down upon the surface of the sea, is both ‘dark and mute’.

Save where is heard the repercussive roar Of drowsy billows on the rugged foot Of rocks remote; or still more distant tone Of seamen in the anchored bark that tell The watch relieved; or one deep voice alone Singing the hour, and bidding ‘Strike the bell!’

However, all is not completely silent: those ‘billows’ – the spume or foam from the sea – crash upon the rocks with such energy that they create a ‘repercussive roar’ as they strike the stones. (Smith’s alliteration, which returns in ‘rugged’ and ‘rocks remote’, suggests the roaring sound of the water on the rocks.)

And there are human sounds, too: sailors in a ‘bark’ or boat shout to each other where their boat is anchored to the shore, as one seaman takes over from another on watch duty. Smith also hears one voice announcing that the next hour has arrived (watches at sea traditionally change over every few hours, on the new hour), striking a bell to signal the hour.

Everything is plunged in the ‘black shadow’ of late evening and coming night, with these shadows suggesting the liminality that is present throughout ‘Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening’. It is a poem that is liminal in terms of its location (between land and sea), its time (evening being between day and night), and its imagery and detail (shadow, plus one sailor giving way to another on watch).

Charlotte Smith concludes the sonnet by broadening out this specific image to make a more philosophical point about life in general: just as these lights are bewitching, like the fairy fires that mislead pilgrims, so ‘reason’ and rational thought – ‘wavering’ like a candle flame that flickers – are unstable and unreliable guides as we make our way through the darkness of life. This is another Romantic touch: the Romantics privileged emotion over reason, and subjective experience over objective ‘truth’. Rationalism is all well and good, but what does it actually feel like to experience the world?

‘Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening’ is an example of an English or Shakespearean sonnet: that is, it’s rhymed abab cdcd efef gg , with three quatrains followed by a concluding rhyming couplet. (We have discussed the different kinds of sonnet in more detail here .) This allows Smith to advance her description of the port scene across three quatrains before we get the volta or ‘turn’ midway through that penultimate line, as so often in Shakespearean sonnets, as she considers what this scene represents.

If you enjoyed ‘Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening’, you might also like Smith’s sonnet on being cautioned against walking on a headland .

Discover more from Interesting Literature

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Type your email…

5 thoughts on “A Short Analysis of Charlotte Smith’s ‘Written near a Port on a Dark Evening’”

• Pingback: 10 of the Best Poems about Darkness | Interesting Literature

Wonderful piece of poetry. Rolls right off the tongue. Thanks for sharing.

Glorious, isn’t it? And so right: it needs to be read aloud for the full effect.

• Pingback: 10 of the Best Poems about Darkness – Interesting Literature

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading

Poem about fool in Black Sea port (6)

I believe the answer is:

' black sea port ' is the definition. (Ukrainian port on the Black Sea) ' poem about fool ' is the wordplay. ' poem ' becomes ' ode ' (ode is a type of poem) . ' about ' shows that the letters should be reversed in order. ' fool ' becomes ' ass ' (both can mean a stupid person) . ' ass ' back-to-front is ' ssa '. ' ode '+' ssa '=' ODESSA ' ' in ' acts as a link.

(Other definitions for odessa that I've seen before include "Do seas come into Ukrainian city?" , "Ukrainian naval base" , "Ukrainian Black Sea port" , "Battleship Potemkin mutiny port" , "Seaport" .)

Crossword Clues

The CroswodSolver.com system found 24 answers for poems and essays central to a black sea port crossword clue. Our system collect crossword clues from most populer crossword, cryptic puzzle, quick/small crossword that found in Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Daily Express, Daily Mirror, Herald-Sun, The Courier-Mail, Dominion Post and many others popular newspaper. Enter the answer length or the answer pattern to get better results.

Poems And Essays Central To A Black Sea Port Crossword Clue and Answers List

Robert Louis Stevenson

A visit from the sea.

From Underwoods

#ScottishWriters

Other works by Robert Louis Stevenson...

T last she comes, O never more In this dear patience of my pain To leave me lonely as before, Or leave my soul alone again.

Far `yont amang the years to be When a’ we think, an’ a’ we see, An’ a’ we luve, `s been dung ajee By time’s rouch shouther, An’ what was richt and wrang for m…

The gauger walked with willing foo… And aye the gauger played the flut… And what should Master Gauger pla… But Over the hills and far away? Whene’er I buckle on my pack

Under the wide and starry sky Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me…

THE wind may blaw the lee—gang wa… And aye the lift be mirk an’ gray, An deep the moss and steigh the br… Where a’ maun gang — There’s still an hoor in ilka day

HERE lies Erotion, whom at six y… Fate pilfered. Stranger (when I t… Who shall succeed me in my rural f… To this small spirit annual honour… Bright be thy hearth, hale be thy…

FEAR not, dear friend, but freel… Though lesser lives should suffer.… A lesser life, that what is his of… Gladly would give for you, and wha… Step, without trouble, down the su…

I DREAMED of forest alleys fai… And fields of gray—flowered grass, Where by the yellow summer moon My Jenny seemed to pass. I dreamed the yellow summer moon,

My bonny man, the warld, it’s true… Was made for neither me nor you; It’s just a place to warstle throu… As job confessed o’t; And aye the best that we’ll can do

Trusty, dusky, vivid, true, With eyes of gold and bramble—dew, Steel—true and blade—straight, The great artificer Made my mate.

AS when the hunt by holt and fiel… Drives on with horn and strife, Hunger of hopeless things pursues Our spirits throughout life. The sea’s roar fills us aching ful…

O DULL cold northern sky, O brawling sabbath bells, O feebly twittering Autumn bird t… The year is like to die! O still, spoiled trees, O city wa…

I will make you brooches and toys… Of bird—song at morning and star—s… I will make a palace fit for you a… Of green days in forests and blue… I will make my kitchen, and you sh…

To see the infinite pity of this p… The mangled limb, the devastated f… The innocent sufferer smiling at t… A fool were tempted to deny his G… He sees, he shrinks. But if he g…

Friend, in my mountain-side demesn… My plain-beholding, rosy, green And linnet-haunted garden-ground, Let still the esculents abound. Let first the onion flourish there…

• Poem Guides
• Poem of the Day
• Collections
• Harriet Books
• Featured Blogger
• Articles Home
• All Articles
• Podcasts Home
• All Podcasts
• Glossary of Poetic Terms
• Poetry Out Loud
• Upcoming Events
• All Past Events
• Exhibitions
• Poetry Magazine Home
• Current Issue
• Poetry Magazine Archive
• Subscriptions
• About the Magazine
• How to Submit
• Advertise with Us
• About Us Home
• Foundation News
• Awards & Grants
• Media Partnerships
• Press Releases
• Newsletters

Life Upon These Shores

• Share on Twitter
• Share on Facebook
• Print this page
• Email this page

This autumn in New York, in a composition course on New York City history, I taught E. B. White ’s essay “Here is New York” and encountered, once again, his wonderful definition of poetry: “a poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.” In “ Middle Passage ,” one of Robert Hayden ’s best known and most anthologized poems, Hayden lyrically compressed the complex history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade into a compelling narrative. Into this poem he compressed the theological justifications behind slavery, the global capitalist economy it created, the political system that codified it, the complicity of African slave traders in it, the sexual violence against enslaved women, and the constant threats of revolt. And into this poem Hayden also added the will to freedom—“the deep immortal human wish / the timeless will.” 

“Middle Passage” was first published in 1945 in Phylon , the journal founded and edited by W.E.B. Du Bois at Atlanta University. It’s a complex, allusive text that draws on the history and archives of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, incorporates the 1839 Amistad rebellion and court case, and ends with Joseph Cinquez, the leader of the rebellion, presented as a transcendent, messianic, world-historical figure. The poem’s stark images of the cruel, calculating, violent, and exploitative nature of the slave trade, articulated in a lyrical , ironic multi-vocal form, makes it among the most provocative representations of slavery in African-American poetry. It’s one of several poems in Hayden’s oeuvre in which he uses the breadth of his language, experience, and historical research to reckon with the peculiar institution, to make sense of the staggering human atrocity of the thing, and to examine slavery’s legacy in contemporary American life.

But Hayden wasn’t always appreciated. The biographies and criticism on him are full of statements about his critical neglect, his disappointments, and his political differences with other black artists and intellectuals. The mannered quality of his poems, the way he portrayed black history through “high” modernist poetry, made him less interesting to some black poets and scholars in the 1960s and ’70s, and maybe even diminishes his profile now. My students in the African-American poetry class I taught last year appreciated the content of his writing, but they were less convinced about his politics and aesthetics. It’s hard to make a case for picking through the intricately baroque lyrics and allusions of “Middle Passage” when placed next to, say, the passionate urgency of Amiri Baraka ’s poem/manifesto “Black Art.” My class listened to Baraka’s work in recorded form—a fiery performance, brimming with defiant negritude, in which Baraka shouts the poem, backed by a band including jazz notables Sonny Murray, Don Cherry, and Albert Ayler.

Hayden had a fraught relationship with the evolving identity politics of his time, as the Black Arts Movement picked up steam in the 1960s and “Negroes” began calling themselves “Afro-American” and “black.” He found himself on the wrong side of it by declaring himself a “poet” first and not a “black poet.” John Hatcher’s biography of Hayden, From the Auroral Darkness , has a chapter simply titled “The Controversy,” which focuses on the argument between Hayden and Black Arts Movement devotees at a 1966 literary conference at Fisk University, and how the fallout from that period resonated through the remaining years of Hayden’s life. He was suspicious of political poetry (which he dabbled in earlier in his career by writing strident leftist poems) and remained skeptical about the poetry of “self-expression.” At the same time, the essays in Hayden’s Collected Prose show that he kept up with new trends in American poetry, reading and writing about Nikki Giovanni and Amiri Baraka, and the Beats such as Corso and Allen Ginsberg .

Still, he remained a devoted formalist . In multiple interviews he stated that he was influenced by W.H. Auden , with whom he took classes as an M.A. student at the University of Michigan in the 1940s. From Auden he got the idea that a great poem is like algebra, in which the reader must “solve for x,” rather than the simple arithmetic of 1 + 1 = 2.

When it comes to describing Hayden’s aesthetics, it’s hard to improve upon Gwendolyn Brooks’s description of him in a 1966 Negro Digest review of Hayden’s Selected Poems :

We need the poet who “lives in life,” mixes with mud, rolls in rot, claws the scoundrels, bleeds and bloodies, and gasping in the field, writes right there, his wounds like faucets above his page, at once besmutching and ennobling it. We need, also, the poet who finds life always interesting, sometimes appalling, sometimes appealing, but consistently amenable to a clarifying enchantment via the powers of Art. His reverence for the word Art is what chiefly distinguishes him from Poet I. Poet II, moreover, may postpone composition until he is off the field, rid of the fray’s insignia, and has a bath. Poet II is Robert Hayden, one of a growing group of Negro poets believing that matter is not enough, believing that there should be a marriage between matter and manner. 

These days I’m with Brooks. I’ve learned to appreciate that the black poetic tradition is large enough to encompass Poets I, and II, and III and IV, and whoever else wants to join The Negro Caravan, even as we engage in productive debates about the aesthetic choices that black artists and intellectuals make. The writer Julius Lester also made a salient point about Hayden’s poetry from the experience of having studied with him as a student at Fisk University. “In creative writing classes he tried to teach us that words were our principal tool, and, no matter how important our ‘message’ to be, it was words that expressed it.” In those terms I believe “Middle Passage” is one of Hayden’s most important achievements of form and message.

Hayden was particularly inspired by Stephen Vincent Benét ’s John Brown’s Body (1927), from which he borrowed the title for his first (unfinished) poetry book The Black Spear : “Oh black skinned epic, epic with the black spear / I cannot sing you, having too white a heart.” In an interview Hayden expressed that in his youth he wanted to be the poet to fulfill Benet’s lament, and wanted “Middle Passage” to be the black-skinned epic that Benét anticipated.

“Middle Passage” first appeared in 1945, but Hayden revised and updated the poem into its final form in his 1966 collection Selected Poems . The poem is structured in three parts, and its outline is best described by Hayden himself:

In the opening section I describe the dreadful conditions aboard the slave ships, the brutal and inhuman treatment of the slaves. The scenes and incidents here are adapted from ships’ logs, eyewitness accounts by traders, depositions…In the second part, we are listening to the reminiscences of an old slave trader…The third section is climactic, the first two move toward it. It’s based on the accounts of the Amistad mutiny in 1839. It’s meant to recapitulate all the themes introduced earlier and focuses on the heroic resistance to slavery introduced at the very beginning. ( Collected Prose )

Hayden’s account of the Amistad case was inspired by Muriel Rukeyser ’s Willard Gibbs (1942), a biography of Josiah Willard Gibbs, the scientist who assisted in the defense of the Amistad mutineers. Rukeyser’s book contained one of the most thorough narratives of the Amistad case at the time, before historians took it up and studied it more closely.

“Middle Passage” has been celebrated by critics for its biting irony, brilliantly expressed in the hymns sung by the slave traders praying for safe passage (for themselves), and justifying the terrible business with a twisted theology of conversion and deliverance:

Jesus    Savior     Pilot       Me Over     Life's       Tempestuous   Sea

We pray that thou wilt grant, O Lord, safe passage to our vessels bringing heathen souls unto Thy chastening.

Jesus       Savior

And Hayden didn’t shy away from the difficult ethical challenges in his narrative of the slave trade. Despite the fact that chattel slavery was unprecedented in its racialized, legal, hereditary form, there was complicity among Africans in the dreadful business, a complicity alluded to in the European slave trader’s condescending recollections:

Aye, lad, and I have seen those factories, Gambia, Rio Pongo, Calabar; have watched the artful mongos baiting traps of war wherein the victor and the vanquished Were caught as prizes for our barracoons. Have seen the nigger kings whose vanity and greed turned wild black hides of Fellatah, Mandingo, Ibo, Kru to gold for us.

These transactions, turning black bodies into currency, were the makings of a new global capitalist economy. In one passage of the poem, Hayden uses a metaphor of weaving to describe chattel slavery’s role in the creation of the “New World,” the ships as implements in a new fabric woven by their movements back and forth across the Atlantic:

Shuttles in the rocking loom of history, the dark ships move, the dark ships move, their bright ironical names like jests of kindness on a murderer's mouth; plough through thrashing glister toward fata morgana's lucent melting shore, weave toward New World littorals that are mirage and myth and actual shore.

These lines remind me of a recent data visualization by Slate’s Andrew Kahn and Jamelle Bouie, a map of the Atlantic , with dots moving across the waters and landing at various points in South, Central and North Americas, representing 20,528 slave ship voyages over 315 years. 

Lately, I have been thinking about “Middle Passage” in terms of Christina Sharpe’s book Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2009), and her framing of a post-slavery subjectivity in which the violence and racialized subjugation of chattel slavery, particularly carried out in intimate sexual and social relations between enslaver and enslaved, have continued to shape our ideas about blackness and whiteness into the present. As she writes, “I mean Monstrous Intimacies to intervene in and to position us to see and think anew what it means to be a (black) post-slavery subject positioned within everyday intimate brutalities who is said to have survived or to be surviving the past of slavery, that is not yet past, bearing something like freedom” In Hayden’s poem those monstrous intimacies manifest in the hold of the ship, told by a slave trader in a court deposition:

"Deponent further sayeth The Bella J left the Guinea Coast with cargo of five hundred blacks and odd for the barracoons of Florida: "That there was hardly room 'tween-decks for half the sweltering cattle stowed spoon-fashion there; that some went mad of thirst and tore their flesh and sucked the blood: "That Crew and Captain lusted with the comeliest of the savage girls kept naked in the cabins; that there was one they called The Guinea Rose and they cast lots and fought to lie with her: "That when the Bo's'n piped all hands, the flames spreading from starboard already were beyond control, the negroes howling and their chains entangled with the flames: "That the burning blacks could not be reached, that the Crew abandoned ship, leaving their shrieking negresses behind, that the Captain perished drunken with the wenches:

With the refrain of “voyage through death/to life upon these shores,” Hayden challenges the reader to imagine how life on the yonder shore is underwritten by the violence and carnage of this passage, to think about that past, which is not yet past, and how its brutalities linger in the structure and ideology of the present.

That brutality is rooted in the business of slave trading, in the commodification of human bodies. (“Twenty years a trader, twenty years, / for there was wealth aplenty to be harvested / from those black fields, and I'd be trading still / but for the fevers melting down my bones.”) In Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market , Walter Johnson argues that the slave traders were critical of the paternalism of the enslavers. His book focuses on the domestic slave market in the US, but he articulates an important principle of chattel slavery as a whole. For slaveholders to see themselves as the ones who cared for their slaves and who assimilated them into Christianity, they took great pains to maintain an ideological separation of “slavery” from the “market,” making sure to “trace an imaginary line of self-justification between ‘slavery,’ where slaves were sold only by happenstance, and the ‘market’ where every slave was always for sale.” Traders did the gruesome work of transporting and selling human beings, carrying them through a tedious journey that often required killing a few to save the many, and then bartering them on the auction block. It was their job to do the dirty, violent, unspeakable labor in the underbelly of capital, and, like Al Pacino’s Tony Montana in Scarface , they were the “bad guys” that the slaveocracy needed to preserve the veneer of gentility and respectability.

For all its righteous indignation about the abject horrors of the slave trade, and despite the poem’s ending with a celebration of Cinquez and the Amistad mutineers, Hayden’s poem centers on, and is mostly told through, the voices of the enslavers. In a critical essay on “Middle Passage” and the poetry of slavery, literary scholar Jon Woodson gives the poem one of its most rigorous and skeptical readings, paying attention to the literary influences on Hayden’s Modernist form in the poem, including Eliot , Pound , and Crane , and picking apart its allusions to Coleridge ’s “ The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ” and Shakespeare ’s The Tempest . But Woodson notes that the enslaved do not have voices in the poem, not even Cinquez, and that “since the poem restricts itself to only the middle passage , it cannot evaluate the theme of ‘life upon these shores’ even while evoking the themes of futurity and transcendence in the poem’s concluding lines.” Nevertheless, the poem continues to have a profound influence, and perhaps the “life upon these shores” in its last line is embodied in its many readers.

In 1976, Hayden became the first African American to be appointed the consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress. Here on the Poetry Foundation website, you can listen to a recording of Hayden reading from “Middle Passage” during his appointment. I listened to the recording while reading the text of the poem and noticed Hayden’s restless poetic mind at work, making subtle editorial changes in his reading: hardly changes to scarcely , baiting to setting , named to called , deft to skilled , moonless to noiseless , wounding to blinding . Hayden was a meticulous editor of his own poems, constantly working toward linguistic precision.

That care with words, seeking out the best words in the best order, is indicative of Hayden’s belief in poetry as a specialized language. That kind of poetry fell out of fashion in the latter part of the 20th century as people turned to the directness and clarity of free verse (think Charles Bukowski and his popularity). But that sense of poetry as other than direct speech was also recovered by rappers and their obsessions with puns , wordplay, and rhyme and meter . In hip-hop terms, Hayden had “bars” (though he may not have cared for the genre’s lurid content), and he applied that literary talent to tell a poignant story about slavery and freedom.

“Middle Passage” hearkens back to the voyages that set these complex narratives of American life in motion, using the ironic voices of the slave traders, allowing them to implicate themselves in the appalling business. In the foreground of “Middle Passage” are the voices of those slave traders, pondering the “misfortune” that befell them on their journeys across the Atlantic, the sensational incidents in which voyages were interrupted by sickness, fire, or rebellion, their testimonies justifying themselves in courts of law. In the background is perhaps a more unsettling image: a sailing ship, successfully loaded with human cargo, piloted by the pious Christian captain, embarking from the west coast of Africa, crossing the Atlantic with somewhere to get to, sailing calmly on.

Lavelle Porter is a writer and scholar of African-American literature. He is an assistant professor of English at the New York City College of Technology (CUNY), and he is currently working on a book about academic fiction and black higher education.

Celebrating Black History Month

Robert hayden, e. b. white, middle passage.

• See All Related Content

Poems, articles, and podcasts that explore African American history and culture.

Poet Robert Hayden was born Asa Bundy Sheffey into a poor family in the Paradise Valley neighborhood of Detroit; he had an emotionally traumatic childhood and was raised in part...

Born in Mount Vernon, New York, children’s writer and poet Elwyn Brooks White was the youngest of six children. He earned a BA at Cornell University. White wrote for the ...

What an engaging essay this is. I was trying to reverse a sleepless night recently, and instead of treating my insomnia, Professor Porter opened my eyes wide to both Robert Hayden and the poem "Middle Passage." Thank you for your respectful inroduction to Mr. Hayden; I am grateful to you and the poet for finding such compelling, and beautiful, language to investigate the foulest chapter of human moral history.

Thank you for this fine essay on Robert Hayden's "Middle Passage," an important poem.

An amazing discovery ...and very moving history...to read at 4am while browsing the internet.Thank you for the introduction to Robert Hayden's Middle Passage.

I stumbled on this essay looking for information about something else--and found I was rooted to the page. Thank you for opening a window and a door. Middle Passage is extraordinary. I was arrested and nauseated in all the best ways. I hope I can read and explain the poem to my boys with 1/16 of the elegance and accessibility of your essay.

• Audio Poems
• Audio Poem of the Day
• Twitter Find us on Twitter
• Facebook Find us on Facebook
• Instagram Find us on Instagram
• Facebook Find us on Facebook Poetry Foundation Children
• Twitter Find us on Twitter Poetry Magazine
• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Use
• Poetry Mobile App
• 61 West Superior Street, Chicago, IL 60654
• © 2024 Poetry Foundation

• National Poetry Month
• Materials for Teachers
• Literary Seminars
• American Poets Magazine

Main navigation

• Academy of American Poets

User account menu

Find and share the perfect poems.

Page submenu block

• literary seminars
• materials for teachers
• poetry near you

Add to anthology

Hello, sailor boy, In from the sea! Hello, sailor, Come with me!

Come on drink cognac. Rather have wine? Come here, I love you. Come and be mine.

Lights, sailor boy, Warm, white lights. Solid land, kid. Wild, white nights.

Come on, sailor, Out o’ the sea. Let’s go, sweetie! Come with me.

From The Weary Blues (Alfred A. Knopf, 1926) by Langston Hughes. This poem is in the public domain. 

More by this poet

The weary blues.

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,      I heard a Negro play. Down on Lenox Avenue the other night By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light      He did a lazy sway . . .      He did a lazy sway . . . To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.

Theme for English B

The instructor said,

     Go home and write      a page tonight.      And let that page come out of you—      Then, it will be true.

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the      flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Newsletter Sign Up

• Academy of American Poets Newsletter
• Academy of American Poets Educator Newsletter
• Teach This Poem