The Shores Beyond
My family and I have long spent our summers on an island in Nova Scotia, home to a few fishing villages, inhabited mainly by Frenchmen and Scots, whose families have lived there for three hundred years. As late as Rudyard Kipling's novel Captains Courageous, the name of the main village, Arichat, was well known to men of the northeast who went down to the sea in ships. They risked their lives to comb the Grand Banks, in those days abundantly rich in cod and flounder; and some went whaling, to bring back the finest oil in the world for lamps and machines. It stirs something deep within me to consider that when a woman in the landlocked plains of Iowa lit her lamp at night, it was because men had gone round the Horn and braved the terrible storms and the cold, with ice sheeting the masts and sails.
Arichat still sends men out on fishing boats, and they had kept the long tradition of asking one of the Catholic priests to come to the harbor on a certain day in June, to bless the boats and their sailors. Then a pastor arrived who decided that that was too old-fashioned, and since they must eventually learn to do without a regular priest, they might as well get the idea now. He refused to bless the boats, the link was snapped, and something old and venerable and essential to the culture of the place was lost.
Yet I think we might all learn from such a custom as the blessing of ships. The metaphor is a natural one for all peoples who go forth on the water. Life is a voyage, and when it will end and where, no one knows. It is not a pleasure cruise, though the waters are often calm and the sun benign. Onward we go, "crossing the bar," as the elderly Tennyson put it, and if God is not our helmsman, expect the abyss to swallow us down.
A Hymn for Sailors
I consider these things, because I have lit upon a fine hymn that was a favorite of sailors in times past, originally called Zopheras trikumias in the Greek of its eighth-century poet, Saint Anatolius, and translated by the worthy John Mason Neale as "Fierce Was the Wild Billow." Of the two melodies I have seen it set to, I prefer the old English one called Saint Issey, an F minor tune whose first line ends on a major chord, A-flat, but whose second and final line ends back on F minor. If melodies, unlike babies and puppies and kittens, may legitimately be assigned a gender, this one is masculine, characterized in each line by a powerful progression downward, A-flat to F to C.
If you are going to compose a hymn for sailors, or for any of us in the midst of life's storm and stress, you might naturally turn to that scene in the Gospel when the disciples were on the Sea of Galilee and they were caught at night in a sudden tempest, and the Lord appeared to them, saying, "Be of good heart, it is I" (Matt. 14:27). So it is in the first stanza:
Fierce was the wild billow,
Dark was the night;
Oars labored heavily,
Foam glimmered white;
Trembled the mariners,
Peril was nigh:
Then said the God of God,
"Peace! It is I."
That is powerful indeed. I have often tried to explain to my students that long lines of poetry can suggest great speed, even lighthearted glee—think of the fine hymn that begins with a rush, "Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the king of creation," fourteen syllables! But short lines can suggest the solemn, even the ominous—because we tend to take the same time to pronounce a line in our minds, regardless of length, and that means we draw out the few syllables we see.
Here, nothing natural or man-made can save the mariners. The wind, the waves, and the night are all against them. But God breaks into the scene—God, and not their own eyes straining to see the form of someone approaching them on the water. Suddenly—at least as we experience it, it is sudden—God is there. And he is the "God of God," as the Nicene Creed puts it so mightily, Christ. He does not say to us, "Peace, I will do thus and so." He says, simply, that he is there. Is that not what we really want? Is that not, in the end, all we want?
A New Creation of Peace
In the second stanza, the poet bravely issues a command to the wind and the waves, to darkness and human sorrow. It is a bold move. He—that is, we—can issue that command, not because we have the power, but because we know who is with us, and who has conquered already:
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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more on music from the online archives
33.3—May/June 2020
Bach's Cantata BWV 106, Gottes Zeit ist die allerbesteZeit (God's time is the very best time) by Ken Myers
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31.2—March/April 2018
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