I am quoting from one of
Barry Cornwall's most popular lyrics. When I first read this singularly
vapid poem years ago, in mid-Atlantic, I wondered if the author had ever
laid eyes on any piece of water wider than the Thames at Greenwich, and
in looking over Barry Cornwall's "Life and Letters" I am not so much
surprised as amused to learn that he was never out of sight of land
in the whole course of his existence. It is to be said of him more
positively than the captain of the Pinafore said it of himself, that he
was hardly ever sick at sea.
Imagine Byron or Shelley, who knew the ocean in all its protean moods,
piping such thin feebleness as
"The blue, the fresh, the ever free!"
To do that required a man whose acquaintance with the deep was limited
to a view of it from an upper window at Margate or Scarborough. Even
frequent dinners of turbot and whitebait at the sign of The Ship and
Turtle will not enable one to write sea poetry.
Considering the actual facts, there is something weird in the statement,
I 'm on the sea! I 'm on the sea!
I am where I would ever be.
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