The Sea Hold

Description

Listen & Peruse

The Sea Hold

by Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg’s 1918 poem The Sea Hold” is a mesmerizing text, blending mundane details of life on the Chesapeake – fish fries, tar-paper shacks, clam boats, oyster beds – with a vast looming sense of the boundless expanse of the sea. I can only hope to have done it justice. — KK

 

THE SEA is large.
The sea hold on a leg of land in the Chesapeake hugs an early sunset and a last morning star over the oyster beds and the late clam boats of lonely men.
Five white houses on a half-mile strip of land … five white dice rolled from a tube.

Not so long ago … the sea was large…
And to-day the sea has lost nothing … it keeps all.

I am a loon about the sea.
I make so many sea songs, I cry so many sea cries, I forget so many sea songs and sea cries.

I am a loon about the sea.
So are five men I had a fish fry with once in a tar-paper shack trembling in a sand storm.

The sea knows more about them than they know themselves.
They know only how the sea hugs and will not let go.

The sea is large.
The sea must know more than any of us.

— Carl Sandburg, “The Sea Hold” from Cornhuskers, 1918