Tidal Dreams - Once Upon a Tide Review

When did the tide come up to be imagined equally a moral force as well every bit a physical one? Why should a blameless bike of nature be chosen as a metaphor of punishment and mortality? The sunday and moon practise not judge usa in this fashion. Is high tide good and low tide bad in this scheme, or is it the other way around? Is the ebb to be preferred to the inundation? How does this notion really work?

It must offset with the fact that, different celestial bodies, the tide has the power to have human lives. Who does it claim? Information technology claims the ignorant, the reckless, and the just unlucky. Just the body of water would merits many of these lives even if it did not rise and fall, then we must look further if nosotros are to explicate why the tide specifically carries the symbolism that it does.

The tide introduces the vertical move of the sea. It is surely significant that nosotros naturally tend to speak of the moods and emotions that govern our moral behavior in terms of high and low. In this, the tide joins many natural metaphors used to describe high and low mood. Loftier tide represents hope and opportunity—the "tide in the affairs of men, / Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune." Low tide stands for the loss of these things, as nosotros encounter in John Betjeman's poem "Youth and Historic period on Beaulieu River." The poet'south tanned erotic fancy here is not the lawn tennis-playing Miss Joan Hunter Dunn only "Clemency, the General'south daughter," who sails out on the tide and "Volition return upon the flood," while sometime Mrs. Fairclough optics her enviously through binoculars: "the older woman only / Knows the ebb-tide leaves her solitary / With the shining fields of mud."

This vertical motility, unlike that of the poet's skylark or the burrowing mole, say, also occurs inside a certain range, within what ane might, in fact, be tempted to telephone call an appointed range, its high and low limits manifestly set past some godlike power. This aspect of the tide is reflected in our describing word "tidy," which derives from the Center English "tide" and first meant "seasonable"—hence, later "nifty," equally of something "in its identify."

This sense of the tide operating within defined bounds is clear in the lines of the 1860 hymn known every bit the "Navy Hymn":

Eternal father, strong to salve,
Whose arm doth bind the restless wave,
Who bidd'st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep:

The hymnist William Whiting based the work on Psalm 107, in which tempest waves terrify "They that go down to the sea in ships, that exercise concern in great waters." This being the Mediterranean, notwithstanding, in that location is no mention of the tide; the proposition of tidal movement was the add-on of the British hymnist. In a powerful scene in some other of Britten'due south operas, Noye's Fludde, the audience joins in singing the hymn as the inundation rises and Noah's Ark is floated on the stage.

The tidal metaphor provides a useful safety valve for our emotions because we know that its vertical move is both regular and cyclical. It tin can be a comfort when we experience low, considering we know that high tide will come. It provides a salutary bank check when nosotros are in high spirits, reminding united states that euphoria cannot last.

But the tide is a dynamic force. It is not only the extremes of high and low that characterize its role in our lives, but the transitions between the 2, the flood and the ebb. Depending on where we are standing, the flooding tide is a threat, equally Crabbe so powerfully demonstrates. Any 19th-century reader of his poem would exist instantly put in mind of the biblical flood, which was God's penalty for humanity's evil. The rising tide, so, provides a twelve-hourly reminder of our sinfulness. Yet the inundation is also life-giving. Water generates life of all sorts and is the symbol of that life. The idea that animal life emerged from the water is contained in Genesis and the Qur'an, as well as in canonical evolutionary theory. And of course, mammalian nascence is accompanied by a flood of amniotic fluid.

The ebb is, in many ways, more interesting psychologically. The belief that no fauna can die except when the tide is ebbing is attributed to Aristotle, and has been repeated, if not necessarily endorsed, by many distinguished writers since, from Pliny the Elderberry to Sir Thomas Browne and James Frazer in The Gilt Bough, as well as Dickens. The conventionalities is perhaps the inevitable corollary of the less arguable clan betwixt birth and the flood.

This slice of folklore has doubtless also been perpetuated by the custom, in seaside parishes, of recording parishioners' time of decease in relation to the state of the tide. In Shakespeare's Henry Five, Mistress Quickly tells how Falstaff died "just between twelve and i, ev'n at the turning o' th' tide." Withal, in the closing affiliate of Moby-Dick, equally Captain Ahab is lowered into a rowboat to do last battle with the White Whale, he tells Starbuck rationally enough, "Some men die at ebb tide; some at depression water; some at the total of the flood."

Parish records ostend, of course, that people die at any state of the tide, and the custom of noting the death in relation to the tide should be appreciated more every bit an indication of the onetime importance of the tide in shaping littoral communities' sense of time than of annihilation else. Nevertheless, in some places this belief persisted even into the 20th century. David Thomson'south People of the Sea records a Mayo fisherman's thoughts equally his wife dies on the ebb tide: "I idea to myself, and I nevertheless praying, if God spares her at present for these few minutes, and the tide to plow, she will exist safe." Of course, God does not spare the tide to turn: linking death with the inexorable tide is a manner of accepting its inevitability.

Alfred Tennyson was impressed by the sea throughout his long life. Every bit a boy growing up in Lincolnshire, he was taken for holidays to Mablethorpe and Skegness, where he would recite his poems out on the mudflats at low tide. He peculiarly enjoyed stormy days when he could scout the breakers crashing on the wide sands. He later settled at Farringford almost Freshwater Bay on the Island of Wight, where the island is almost cleaved in 2 by the vigorous tides. In Maud, he wrote of "Listening now to the tide in its broad-flung shipwrecking roar." This is no romantic fancy; the island'due south exposed south coast was indeed a shore of wrecks and smugglers.

"Crossing the Bar" is Tennyson's famous anticipation of his own death. It was written speedily, in 1889, when Tennyson was lxxx years old, during a crossing of the Solent to the Isle of Wight. In the verse form, he gives a scrupulous description of the mighty sweep of the tide: "Just such a tide every bit moving seems asleep, / Too full for sound and foam." The flood has borne him far and wide in his life, he records, but now the tide "Turns again dwelling house," and it is this swift ebb—at-home and silent, yet also powerful and undeniable—that will now conduct him away "to run across my Pilot face to face / When I take crost the bar."

Three more British seafarers allow themselves to exist carried here and at that place on the flood tide in Robert Louis Stevenson's 1894 adventure The Ebb-Tide, which was coauthored with his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne. The sailors make it on an idyllic Pacific island in a stolen ship, the Farallone, hearing first the breakers on its reef, before the inundation tide obligingly lifts them into a lagoon sheltered by the walls of a coral reef:

Twice a day the ocean crowded in that narrow archway and was heaped between these frail walls; twice a 24-hour interval, with the return of the ebb, the mighty surplusage of water must struggle to escape. The hr in which the Farallone came there was the hr of the overflowing. The sea turned (as with the instinct of the homing pigeon) for the vast receptacle, swept eddying through the gates, was transmuted, equally it did so, into a wonder of watery and silken hues, and brimmed into the inland body of water beyond.

The three are a dissolute bunch who spend their time squabbling and drinking, having been previously thrown off various ships. On the isle, they meet a compatriot, scarcely better than they are, who is amassing a hoard of pearls that he hopes will make him rich if he ever gets home. Why the "ebb-tide"? The men are literal drifters, arriving where they practice every bit a issue of being "taken past the inundation"; the ebb, though, is a symbol of moral turpitude, the measure of the depths to which the four Britons take sunk.

The tide is given a dissimilar moral ability in another Victorian poet's best-known piece of work. Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" has been much admired and much puzzled over since its publication in 1867, and information technology is still a popular text for analysis in literature classes. The short poem begins as a elementary nocturne: "The bounding main is at-home to-nighttime. / The tide is full, . . ." But the mood apace darkens. A light on the distant coast goes out; the pebbles on the embankment make an incessant "grating roar"; the poet's mind turns to miserable thoughts, and so to this grim aperçu:

The Sea of Religion
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth'due south shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
Just now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the jiff
Of the dark-wind, down vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

This earth, Arnold concludes, "Hath actually neither joy, nor beloved, nor low-cal, / Nor finality, nor peace, nor assistance for pain."

Information technology seems at starting time that the poem might be a complaining on the crisis of Christian faith induced by the publication of Charles Darwin'south On the Origin of Species in 1859. Just Arnold is believed to have conceived the lines when staying at Dover on his honeymoon in June 1851. (Whether Mrs. Arnold enjoyed the trip as much as her husband is non recorded.)

But the idea of religion as a tidal bounding main immediately raises circuitous questions. Arnold's overt pessimism seems to indicate that organized religion might withdraw forever, but the metaphor tells usa information technology will return. Perhaps it shows the poet's organized religion in faith. Notwithstanding the supposition that organized religion may ascension and autumn, that information technology is cyclical, subject to some kind of angelic mechanism, is itself surely a profane idea. The poet reconciles himself to something more than like classical stoicism than like the stupid reverence of Victorian churchgoing.

The fashion for tidal metaphor during the Victorian period is surely explained in role by growing awareness in a land no longer "hedged in with the primary," equally Shakespeare has information technology in Male monarch John. A maritime empire ensured that the bounding main was no longer a vast unknown. Its depths were charted by the British Admiralty, its lengths crossed by exotic goods and, increasingly, by leisure travelers. Seaside resorts grew up where people had in one case only feared the ocean and turned their backs on it. Now, they began to look out on it, and to paddle and swim in it. Aldeburgh is one of many erstwhile littoral towns where the dwellings evidence ample evidence of both of these attitudes toward the sea.

Today, nonetheless, our employment of the tide as a metaphor has grown rather more casual than the poets'. We forget it is a cyclical miracle, in which each station and action is leap to recur. Instead, the inundation becomes a i-off cataclysm. News reports warn of a flood of immigrants, of information, of cheap imports. That's peradventure forgivable, since a flood is not only a inundation tide, just a one-off pluvial deluge. Simply the ebb is treated with the aforementioned lack of regard and seen as a terminal loss of opportunity. When we say that hopes of finding survivors after an earthquake or similar disaster are "ebbing away," nosotros really hateful that promise is lost. If the chances of a successful result of a summit meeting are "ebbing abroad," nosotros mean to say that that chance volition non come up once more. If we were more precise near it, we would be suggesting most the opposite: that another chance, just every bit adept, volition come up along pretty presently.

From THE TIDE: The Science and Stories Backside the Greatest Forcefulness on Earth.Used with permission of W. W. Norton and Company. Copyright 2016 by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

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