The Wreck

Summary

A narrative poem describes a mariner's encounter with a shipwreck, a ghostly crew, and a talking skeleton offering a safer sea route.

Abstract

The poem "The Wreck" unfolds a harrowing tale of a sailor who discovers a shipwreck on a desolate island. Amidst the debris and the presence of scavenging animals, he is confronted with the haunting sight of a dead man. Through his telescope, he observes the dead man's coal-black bones moving with unsettling life. As the skeleton approaches, it speaks to the sailor, offering a safer passage through the treacherous waters. The poem concludes with the ship being violently transported over the ghostly crew's watery graves, leaving the reader to ponder the fate of the drowned sailors and the eerie existence of the undead mariners cursed to roam the sea.

Opinions

The poem conveys a sense of eerie mystery and supernatural intervention in the maritime world.
It suggests that the sea holds secrets and dangers beyond human understanding or control.
The skeleton's offer of a safer route implies a theme of trust in the unknown and the possibility of alliances with the otherworldly.
The poem evokes a sense of empathy for the sailor's plight and the fate of those lost at sea.
It reflects on the cyclical nature of life and death, as the ghostly crew seems trapped in a perpetual state of existence within the sea's domain.

A narrative poem.

Tumbled on the choppy shore planks and nails, wood and board wash aboard a lonely isle in the middle of the sea.

“Ahoy!” I say, forward tipping, pointing to the awful ripping, gulls and rats a graveyard-picking in the middle of the sea.

Looming on that wicked beach staggering sight and all belief — a dead man staring, staring me in the middle of the sea!

Through telescope, his cold eyes smolder, coal-black bones the size of boulders bending and rolling as joints turn over in the middle of the sea.

Closer still and closer yet, the horror which my mind begets shambles to my shadowed ship in the middle of that sea.

Bony limbs grasp groaning planks, tugging ship on shallow banks toward bony doom and hellish ranks in the middle of the sea.

Before I can with cunning plead a parley for my boarded steed, that grinning skull soft speaks to me in the middle of the sea.

“Fear not — ” it stumbles, soon recovers — “I have a safer route discovered for your sanguine ship that shudders in the middle of my sea.”

Splish! Splashes ship upon the graves crashing, smashing flat the waves, falling, standing, shortly landing in the middle of his sea.

Wonder, if the ghostly crew drowned, as all good sailors do? Upright, were they, by dint of day, in the middle of their sea?

Perhaps they grasped the light of moon: trapped by life in lasting doom, cursed to crash the lost marooned in the middle of the sea.