PAD Day 9: Fury of the Sea

 Today's prompts from Write Better Poetry and NaPoWriMo: (1) Write an ekphrastic poem, and (2) "Like music, poetry offers us a way to play with and experience sound. This can be through meter, rhyme, varying line lengths, assonance, alliteration, and other techniques that call attention not just to the meaning of words, but the way they echo and resonate against each other. For a look at some of these sound devices in action, read Robert Hillyer’s poem, Fog. It uses both rhyme and uneven line lengths to create a slow, off-kilter rhythm that heightens the poem’s overall ominousness. Today we’d like to challenge you to try writing a poem of your own that uses rhyme, but without adhering to specific line lengths. For extra credit, reference a very specific sound, like the buoy in Hillyer’s poem."

Once again, today's two prompts melded well together, as Maureen at NaPoWriMo has already been encouraging ekphrastic poetry. I read Hillyer's poem, and the images in it inspired me to do my own poem with a maritime setting, so I also visited Maureen's link to the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, which has a lot of maritime art and artifacts. One painting particularly struck me, so I read some background history of the event depicted by the work: the wreck one of three ships in 1802 during a terrible blizzard near Cape Cod. Three "Eastindia" merchant ships left Salem together on a springlike February day in 1802 - the Volusia, the Ulysses, and the Brutus - and by that night a terrible blizzard had moved into the cape. All three were shipwrecked before the next day dawned, and the entire crew of two of them survived, but eight of the thirteen crew of the Brutus perished, including their captain, all actually freezing to death before they could find shelter from the harsh blizzard conditions. The other two ships' captains were named Cook (no relation to the famous British explorer, as far as I know), so I deduced from the description I read about the wrecks that this painting depicts the Volusia, with its loss of its rear and middle masts (cut down by the crew to try to maintain control of the ship) and its captain named Samuel Cook. I'm not sure I entirely captured the spirit of the assignment (my rhymes are internal and sort of random), but here's my poem:

Wreck of the Volusia

(after the painting Captain Cook Cast a Way on Cape Cod,             1802, by Michele Felice Cornè )

 

Caught in a roiling fury

between sky and sea,

a sudden Nor’easter, the merchant ship founders

as all hands toil and scurry to save it

and themselves from disaster.

The waves come faster, higher,

the wind wails,

tears the sail sheets to shreds.

The hull groans and strains, undertow pulls

as the men jettison the mizzen mast

and the main mast like timbered trees.

Waves thunder, crash the deck,

the great ship lumbers and shudders and screams,

lists to port

and finally thuds on the rocks.

 

Captain Cook and his men, who have already prayed

and said silent goodbyes,

find to their surprise they are saved,

and limp to the shore at low tide,

beside themselves with relief,

as the townspeople approach, ready

to greet them with steady hands.

And here is the painting: