LitHits Beach Edition
Our selection of literature in small bites is perfect for a summer's day, starting with 'Long Trip' by Langston Hughes
The sea is a wilderness of waves, A desert of water. We dip and dive, Rise and roll, Hide and are hidden On the sea. Day, night, Night, day, The sea is a desert of waves, A wilderness of water.
…and from Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Beneath us lie the lights of the herring fleet. The cliffs vanish. Rippling small, rippling grey, innumerable waves spread beneath us. I touch nothing. I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling me over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.
…and from T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite Into which is reaches, the beaches where it tosses Its hints of earlier and other creation: The starfish, the hermit crab, the whale's backbone; The pools where it offers to our curiosity The more delicate algae and the sea anemone. It tosses up our losses, the torn seine, The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices.
…and from Emily Dickinson’s ‘I started Early — Took my Dog’
I started Early – Took my Dog – And visited the Sea – The Mermaids in the Basement Came out to look at me – And Frigates – in the Upper Floor Extended Hempen Hands – Presuming Me to be a Mouse – Aground – upon the Sands – (Dickinson never actually saw the seaside--she only imagined it.)
….and from Alfred Tennyson, ‘The Lotos-Eaters’
How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream, With half-shut eyes ever to seem Falling asleep in a half-dream! To dream and dream, like yonder amber light, Which will not leave the myrrh-bush on the height; To hear each other's whisper'd speech; Eating the Lotos day by day, To watch the crisping ripples on the beach, And tender curving lines of creamy spray; To lend our hearts and spirits wholly To the influence of mild-minded melancholy; To muse and brood and live again in memory, With those old faces of our infancy Heap'd over with a mound of grass, Two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass!
…and from Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, And What Alice Found There
From The Walrus and the Carpenter
The sea was wet as wet could be,
The sands were dry as dry.
You could not see a cloud, because
No cloud was in the sky:
No birds were flying over head—
There were no birds to fly.
The Walrus and the Carpenter
Were walking close at hand;
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
‘If this were only cleared away,’
They said, ‘it would be grand!’
‘If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year,
Do you suppose,’ the Walrus said,
‘That they could get it clear?’
‘I doubt it,’ said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear.Some past beach-themed newsletters…
Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson, ‘At Bay St Louis’
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