H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e3 0The sea was still breaking violently and night
Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet,
When the drowned sailor clutched the drag- net. Light
Flashed from his matted head and marble feet...There is a violent breaking in the verse here as well as in the ocean.
In a bold gesture, the third line ends a sentence and begins a new
one with only one word to go. I say ‘only one word to go’ because
the metre dictates that the line can stretch to only one more
monosyllable. So Lowell audaciously begins a new sentence with
the abrupt word ‘Light’ just as he is running out of line. As a result,
we have a full stop after ‘drag- net’, which signals a brief but
complete pause; then ‘Light’; then we have to pause fractionally
again, leaving the word ‘Light’ dangling, as we run up against the
line- ending and step across to the beginning of the next line. The
syntax and the metrical pattern are played off against each other to
produce some memorable dramatic effects.
We may also note the curious inversion of ‘night / Had steamed
into our North Atlantic Fleet’. It would be more conventional
to speak of the fleet steaming into the night; as it is, the night is
made to sound like a vessel itself, one which is perhaps about to
cause a collision. (There are similar inversions in Shakespeare –
‘His coward lips did from their colour fly,’ for example, an image
from Julius Caesar which is really too cerebral and contrived to be
convincing.) ‘Hurdling’ in ‘coiled, hurdling muscles’ presumably
means ‘like those of a hurdler’. But the phrase could also apply to
the packed, hard, knotted language of the poem itself.
Literary beginnings are not always what they seem. Take, for
example, the magnificent opening lines of John Milton’s Lycidas, a