Thursday, September 30, 2010

The ocean is on fire. The sky turned dark again as the boats came in.

The denotative situation of "Crossing the Bar" (Q1) is as follows:

In stanza one, the speaker mentions the sunset and an evening star, which both emerge at the end of a day. I believe this is symbolic of the end of his life. He also hopes to avoid a "moaning of the bar" when he "put[s] out to sea." I think that means he hopes to die a peaceful and brisk death, when the time comes. The "one clear call" for the speaker is perhaps a call to death, or the arrival of "his time."

The second stanza has a similar tone of imminent demise. "But such a tide as moving seems asleep,/ Too full for sound and foam," sounds to me like the notion that the speaker's life is too full. He has used up his life's potential, and he is headed toward the Great Sleep. (heythat'saeuphemism!)

"Twilight and evening bell" in the third stanza have a similar meaning to the "Sunset and evening star" in the first. It means that the onset of death is upon the speaker, and "After that the dark!" which is, again, death. "And may there be no sadness of farewell/ When I embark;" reminded me a lot of the poem "Valediction." They both forbid the audience to feel sad when they "leave," although for entirely different reasons. Personally, that would make me even more panicky-sad, but whatever.

Stanza four is "For though from out our bourne of Time and Place/ The flood may bear me far,/ I hope to see my Pilot face to face/ When I have crossed the bar." I believe this means that the flood, which symbolizes the rushing changes and differences that occur in death, take him far from his earthly "Time and Place," he hopes to see his Pilot, symbolic of God, "face to face." Also, the "bar" he crosses appears to be death, but in the context of the poem, our group decided it was a sandbar, which follows along with the imagery of the sea and foam and sunset mentioned earlier in the poem.


This song is creepy the first twelve or so times you hear it, but it grows on you. On the plus side, there are no dead people in this particular video.

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