The Ocean

The Ocean



The ocean has its silent caves,



Deep quiet and alone,



Though there be fury on the waves,



Beneath them there is none,



The awful spirits of the deep



Hold their communion there,



And there are those for whom we weep,



The young, the bright, the fair.



Calmly the wearied seamen rest,



Beneath their own blue sea,



The ocean solitudes are blest,



For there is purity,



The Earth has guilt, the Earth has care,





Unquiet are its graves,



But peaceful sleep is ever there,



Beneath the dark blue waves.



By: Nathaniel Hawthorne







I came across this poem and it caught my interest. The ocean has always been seen as a mystery. There is a statistic that says less than 10% of the ocean has been explored and more than 90% of the ocean's inhabitants live in the unexplored areas. Sometimes I wonder why we strive to find other life forms on Mars when we have an entirely unknown world in our backyard.


Anywho, I enjoyed how Hawthorne described the ocean because it made me think of how and why the ocean is portrayed in literature. In most cases (the one's I remember) the ocean is seen as a vast question mark. It alludes to the grandeur of life. If we think of the novel, Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway, we have a perfect example of a man's life consumed by the ocean. The story starts out with a man who lives in the Caribbean and after his depression sets in, he becomes a traveling sailor. He travels to different islands and coastal towns, but he continually talks of how he is called by the sea. Hawthorne's poem and Hemingway's novel are the same story in two different forms of writing. Hemingway's character lived on the sea. It comforted him in a way human compatibility could not. Hawthorne describes the ocean as peaceful, a sort of serene that cannot be found on earth. Land, because it's inhabited, holds all the chaos that humans create. The ocean, because it's mostly untouched, stays innocent. Heminway's character felt the purity and peacefulness that Hawthorne describes.


His characters depression drove him to look for comfort in the most alien object possible. What Hemingway realizes is that the ocean has no care for the depressed. I believe that, although the ocean's cold personality doesn't seem like a shocker, I think it should. Besides Islands in the Sea there is so much literature written where characters are depressed standing next to the sea. It's so predominant, but I've never asked myself why. I believe that the feeling of unimportance we get while looking out onto the ocean is linked with the mystical quality of the ocean. It's that unknown, unintelligent, small feeling that humans have. We go through life only thinking of our needs, and being beside something so big, we can't help to feel very insignificant in the scheme of things.

The reason that people like Hawthorne find the ocean to be a symbol of everything good is that, besides the feeling of insignificance, it lets us know that there is so much more. The ocean is a metaphor for unobtainable knowledge, the idea of believing because we are forced to.