Selected by Caroline Knox
National Poetry Month 2009
Letter from the Editors
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Each weekday in April, Poetry Daily brings its email newsletter readers a special poem, selected by a contemporary poet whose work has appeared on Poetry Daily, as part of its annual fund-raising campaign and in celebration of National Poetry Month. This year, Poetry Daily is presenting these poems and comments to its website readers.
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Caroline Knox's Poetry Month Pick, April 23, 2009
"On a Sea-Storm nigh the Coast"
by Richard Steere (1643-1721)
All round the Horizon black Clouds appear;
A Storm is near:
Darkness Eclipseth the Sereener Sky,
The Winds are high,
Making the Surface of the Ocean Show
Like mountains Lofty, and like Vallies low.
The weighty Seas are rowled from the Deeps
In mighty heaps,
And from the Rocks Foundations do arise
To Kiss the Skies
Wave after Wave in Hills each other Crowds,
As if the Deeps resolv'd to Storm the Clouds.
How did the Surging Billows Fome and Rore
Against the Shore
Threatning to bring the Land under their power
And it Devour:
Those Liquid Mountains on the Clifts were hurld
As to a Chaos they would shake the World.
The Earth did Interpose the Prince of Light,
'Twas Sable night:
All Darkness was but when the Lightnings fly
And light the Sky,
Night, Thunder, Lightning, Rain and raging Wind,
To make a Storm had all their forces joyn'd.
Caroline Knox Comments:
“On a Sea-Storm nigh the Coast” is a masterful short poem by the underread Richard Steere, who was educated in England at a singing school and a Latin school. To avoid the climate under Charles II, he spent much of his life in America.
Steere's lines show a western Enlightenment attention to the natural world. There is an order in the poem as in Nature: although vast, beautiful, and dangerous forces are at work, crafty stanzas control these forces. The speaker is able to document them, and to show that the storm's destructiveness is temporary. It only seems “As if the Deeps resolv'd to Storm the Clouds”; it is only “As to a Chaos” that the “Liquid Mountains” are hurled “on the Clifts”—it's only as if, and it's not going to happen. The “Sereener” order of the poem's opening will be restored, and so it is, in the tranquil final couplet:
Night, Thunder, Lightning, Rain, and raging Wind,
To make a Storm had all their forces joyn'd.
While the speaker makes these sensible remarks, he's certainly enjoying the fear and drama in the storm—this is a poem of gorgeous sounds gorgeously set out: in such parallelisms as “Like mountains Lofty, and like Vallies Low”; in confusions between light and darkness, land and water; and in nice assonance and alliteration—“Fome,” “Rore,” “Shore,” slightly modulating to “power” and “Devour.” Various echoes of Psalms appear. And when “The weighty Seas are rowled from the Deeps/ In mighty heaps,” the experience is grand and heroic; but it's also slightly mock-heroic too – “mighty heaps”! All this makes “On a Sea-Storm” fun to read, silently or aloud, and wouldn't it be good to hear it set to music?
About Caroline Knox:
Caroline Knox's sixth collection, Quaker Guns, appeared from Wave Books in 2008. Her fifth book, He Paves the Road with Iron Bars, won the Maurice English Award for a book by a poet over fifty. She has received awards from the The Fund for Poetry, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the NEA, and Poetry magazine. Her work has appeared in The American Scholar, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Poetry, Times Literary Supplement, and The Yale Review. Photo by Star Black.
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