A big thank you to all of you who sent in your nominations for the SeaBritain 2005 Favourite Poem of the Sea.
Now we would like you to help us choose the winning poem by voting for your favourite from the Top 10 nominations listed below.
To vote, pick your choice from this list and send an e-mail to seapoem@magmapoetry.com with the author and title in the subject heading of the e-mail.
E-mail voting closes at midnight on Monday 7th November 2005 and the winner will be announced at the reading of Sea Poems Old and New at the Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich, on Tuesday 8th November – details below. Please note there will be ballot papers for last-minute voters at the reading in Greenwich!
The Top 10 nominations (in alphabetical order):
• At the Fishhouses – Elizabeth Bishop
“Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
the clear gray icy water …”
• Cargoes– John Masefield
“Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rail, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.”
• Convoy – Charles Causley
“All day we tacked and tacked between the South Head and the North;
All day we hauled the frozen sheets, and got no further forth;
All day as cold as charity, in bitter pain and dread,
For very life and nature we tacked from head to head.”
• Christmas at Sea – Robert Louis Stevenson
“Draw the blanket of ocean
Over the frozen face.
He lies, his eyes quarried by glittering fish,
Staring through the green freezing sea-glass
At the Northern Lights.
He is now a child in the land of Christmas:
Watching, amazed, the white tumbling bears
And the diving seal.”
• Dover Beach – Matthew Arnold
“The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; – on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.”
• The Drunken Boat – Arthur Rimbaud
“Then I bathed in the Poem of the Sea.
Infused with stars, the milk-white spume blends,
Grazing green azures: where ravished, bleached
Flotsam, a drowned man in a dream descends.”
• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion,
As idle as a painted Ship
Upon a painted Ocean.
Water, water every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water every where,
Nor any drop to drink.”
• The Seafarer – Anonymous, Anglo-Saxon c. 8th century
“A song I sing of my sea-adventure,
The strain of peril, the stress of toil,
Which oft I endured in anguish of spirit
Through weary hours of aching woe.”
• Sea Fever – John Masefield
“ I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song, and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking.”
• The Song of the Waterlily – Martin Newell
WE ARE THE SHIP – Shanty
From keel and keelson,
Strakes and sails
From floors and decking
Up to mast
We’ll pull together, pull together
Any weather sky can cast.”
Click here to read the nominations in full on the Magma web forums
Supported by Arts Council England