The Sea as Metaphor in Alec Derwent Hope’s “Man Friday” and Christopher Brennan’s “Each Day I See the Long Ships Coming into Port”
In both Alec Derwent Hope's and Christopher Brennan's poems, the sea is fraught with multiple meanings. Both poets play with the ideas of journey by sea, exile, isolation and home in vastly different ways. A. D. Hope infuses it with the resonances of exile, barriers, division, and finally,...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
SAES
2019-11-01
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| Series: | Angles |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/angles/1209 |
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| Summary: | In both Alec Derwent Hope's and Christopher Brennan's poems, the sea is fraught with multiple meanings. Both poets play with the ideas of journey by sea, exile, isolation and home in vastly different ways. A. D. Hope infuses it with the resonances of exile, barriers, division, and finally, home. The poem begins from where Daniel Defoe leaves off his tale, taking up the story of Man Friday after he is brought by Robinson Crusoe to live in ‘England’s Desert Island’. The completely alien culture that Friday now encounters requires a massive readjustment of his mental and spiritual compass and the sea runs like an undercurrent through the entire poem even when it is not mentioned in so many words. The gradual acceptance of the way of life that is thrust upon him, his transformation (and quiet resignation) into an upper class servant and subsequent marriage and children take him farther and farther away from his memories and encase him within an artificial persona — until the day he accompanies his master to a sea port and hears the ocean’s beckoning roar after many years. The song of the ocean, the rush of memory and Friday’s response to the call of the sea crystallize in the ending of the poem. The poem not only raises issues of choice, ‘savagery’ versus ‘civilization’ and the arrogation of power over lives, it also envisions the sea as both a dividing barrier leading to exile and a welcoming bosom into the embrace of which to return is to go ‘home’. Brennan’s poem can be interpreted as addressing the very core of the Australian experience — the waves of migration from the farthest points of the earth which have shaped the culture and ethos of this continent in myriad ways. It is the sea that has conveyed the hopeful migrants hence and is invoked in terms of a cleansing — something that has ‘charmed away the old rancours’ and allowed them to see the new land with a ‘freshen’d gaze’. The poet wishes to set sail too, not to see many lands and peoples but to find a place of rest perhaps, such as what the people arriving in the long ships aspire to and will find in this new country. For them, in stark contrast to Friday’s voyage to England, the voyage does not signify exile but a coming home, a land full of promise with the potential for great happiness and peace. |
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| ISSN: | 2274-2042 |