Reading Hawthorne during National Oceans Month

Did you know that Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote poetry? While nearly everyone knows The Scarlet Letter, some readers might be less familiar with his other writings. Hawthorne was actually quite accomplished in a variety of genres. In addition to his novels, which he designated as romances due to their mix of historical, folkloric, and gothic elements, he also produced multiple volumes of short stories, essays, children’s literature (a fairly new genre back in the nineteenth century) and even a biography of his friend, president Franklin Pierce. I’ve admired his short stories for a long time, ever since a teacher assigned reading the story “Young Goodman Brown.” But it wasn’t until recently that I discovered Hawthorne’s poetry. When I did, it felt like uncovering a well-kept secret. I had never heard anyone talk about it, even among poets and librarians. In that spirit, here is a short exploratory reading of Hawthorne’s poem The Ocean, in time, conveniently, for National Oceans Month.

Read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Ocean”.

This poem is a ballad. While we might colloquially think of a ballad as a song, it’s a poetic form as well. A ballad poem is made of quatrains (stanzas of four lines each). The first and third lines of each stanza are written in iambic tetrameter, a meter of four stresses per line, falling on alternating syllables. The second and fourth lines of each stanza are written in iambic trimeter, meaning that they have only three stresses each. This pattern, alternating lines with four and three stresses, creates a back-and-forth, call-and-response sort of rhythm which carries throughout the length of the poem. The result is very musical, with a feeling familiar to most of us as a result of so many pop songs whose melodies also follow short alternating call and response patterns. Hence the name of the form. In fact, both ballad poems and contemporary pop songs are really descended from traditional bardic musical forms, which explains the family resemblance. Hawthorne’s subject provides another comparison for the form; the call-and-response structure is reminiscent of the waves alternately advancing and retreating along a shore.

 Ballad poems are really lyrics without words. They usually tell a story. (Contrast that with the sonnet, for example, which usually engages in argument and speculation.) Hawthorne’s poem is unconventional in this regard. “The Ocean” is not much of a narrative, but more like pure description, relying more heavily on image than on conventional narrative structure. Its stanzas don’t follow a linear sequence of events, and there is close to no progressive action. What little action can be teased out of this poem is in simple present tense verbs, such as hold, weep, and rest. These are action words but nonetheless passive in their content. Hawthorne’s images, too, are abstracted from any clear linear progress.

The very first line is striking in its unsubtle consonance. “The Ocean has its silent caves.” Out of six words, five of them contain the /s/ sound. Similar to the meter’s mimicry of the pattern of waves, this repeated sibilant is a mimicry of the sound of the ocean’s retreating waves. It is also the suggestive of the quieting parent’s (or librarian’s) shh shh shh, appropriate for the presence of the word silent and, more provocatively, for Hawthorne’s vision of drowned sailors as resting. The poem’s first line finds a parallel line the third of the third stanza: “The ocean solitudes are blest,” with its four instances of /s/ over the course of five words. Some ballads, as well as other poetic forms, feature refrains, repeated lines that acquire greater significance or shifts in meaning thorough repetition. While this poem appears not to have a refrain upon first reading, the third line of the third stanza is a kind of false refrain.

 “The awful sprits of the deep” are awful firstly in that they experience awe; Hawthorne’s choice of the word communion brings a religious connotation, and the spirits are performing an act of worship or at least of ceremony. But the seemingly innocent last line of the second stanza provides the key to the other, more contemporary sense of the word awful. The spirits, which are the souls of drowned sailors, are young because of their early deaths and also because everyone is young in comparison with the eternity they now inhabit. They are bright in that they are remembered fondly and inspiringly by their living loved-ones (as in the phrase, a bright hope), but also in that they possess an otherworldly ethereal quality (like Hawthorne’s glowing letter A in The Scarlet Letter). They are fair because of the pallid, washed-out color that a drowned corpse acquires in the ocean. Ghosts are white in popular imagination because shrouds were often white, and of course the fairness of the spirits is the whiteness of ghosts as well. Eternal, ethereal, and pallid, the spirits are awful as they would be in any modern-day horror film.

The first two stanzas proceed without metrical variation or counterpoint. The first and only interruption is found in the first line of the third stanza, “calmly the wearied seamen rest.” The stress falls on the first syllable instead of the second – calmly, and obviously not calmly – unlike iambic tetrameter’s stressed second syllable. It’s a short-lived interruption, turning the first three syllables of the line into a dactyl (a metrical pattern, common in poetry, of a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables, as in “calmly the”.) before the poem immediately returns to its normal meter. It’s important that this deviation occurs at the beginning of a stanza, because the result is emphasis not only on the line in which the deviation occurs, but of the whole quatrain. The combination of metrical deviation and the false refrain in the third line makes the third stanza the climax of the poem, but as a point of tonal and aural complexity rather than of action.

Simple, accessible, regional in both its appeal and subject, “The Ocean” is a concise example of the American romantics’ proclivity to combine the sublime and the everyday. Hawthorne was writing at a time when sea travel was slow and dangerous, but also essential to trade, international relations, and emigration. Particularly in New England where he lived and wrote, many men would have made their living off of seafaring one way or another. His readers would have been all too aware of the mundane dangers of work on ocean vessels, living at a time well before the arrival of the present Anthropocene. Here, Hawthorne’s treatment of these themes is not merely popular or populist, but part of the overall affective technique of the poem.

Hawthorne’s novels, short stories, and even his children’s literature are all available through your local MCLS branch.

- by Neil, Lawrence Branch