Time and time again, nature has proven that the deepest parts of the ocean are more serene and holds a lot of secrecy, that’s why people dive deep to have a taste of these mysteries.

In “Secrets of the Sea,” Assan provides commentary on the Syrian refugee crisis. The poem is for Alan Kurdi , a three-year-old Syrian boy whose name made global headlines in 2015 after he drowned in the mediterranean sea, but it is also for all the other refugees that lost their lives. Assan says Kurdi’s name changed the world, while others’ names remain “secrets of the sea.” Gorgeously written, this poem begins by describing the water as unraveling velvet. Fanning describes how the water fills the earth, but never fully encompasses it. Water is always changing its shape, filling yet fleeting. It is everywhere, yet never within your control. We’ve got timeless pieces by renowned poets that encapsulate the grandeur and enigma of the big blue. Reading is tidal, and each tide brings with it new associations. It is difficult now to read John Masefield’s Sea-Fever without thinking of bleaching coral, or Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner without picturing Chris Jordan’s photographs of dead albatross, their stomachs full of brightly coloured plastic. “‘ Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” but avian flu is decimating seabird populations.

8. Song of the Sea by Rainer Maria Rilke

This colourful under the sea poem about ocean life is great for introducing your children to the kinds of creatures that can be found in the sea. It is a great introductory poem if you are planning on teaching a few lessons about ocean life and what happens under the sea. Although he’s often thought of as a somewhat gloomy poet, Larkin (1922-85) had his tenderer, more celebratory moments too, such as in this, the opening poem from his 1974 collection High Windows, describing the annual ritual of the British family seaside holiday. The first of the five sections of ‘The Dry Salvages’ is especially worth reading for its comparative analysis of the river and the sea. The ‘strong brown’ river is the Mississippi, which is ‘untamed and intractable’, and has served as a frontier and as a conduit for commerce. But unlike the river, which is within us, the sea is all about us. The river is a ‘god’, but the sea has ‘many gods’ and ‘many voices’: a polytheistic force of nature. Contemporary Pacific Islander poetry most commonly includes oral and written poetry composed by authors who are genealogically linked to the indigenous people of the areas of the Pacific known as Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia. While many of these poets live within the “Pacific Basin,” there are also many residing in the United States. Because Pacific Islanders are one of the fastest growing populations in America, it is essential that we read Pacific literature, which has for too long been invisible within discussions of American and Global poetry. Set sail on a poetic odyssey where the vast expanse of the ocean becomes a metaphor for the journey of life.

Is this the greatest English poem about a sea-voyage? Coleridge’s friend and collaborator was sceptical about its merits, and toyed with removing it from subsequent editions of their landmark collection Lyrical Ballads (1798). Get ready to be swept away by playful verses that paint vivid pictures of marine life, crashing waves, and endless adventures on the salty shores. “Sea Calm” by Langston Hughes Indulge in the poetic depths as wordsmiths delve into the recesses of their hearts, crafting verses that will make your emotions dance and your soul set sail.the phrase cry me a river of tears is never taken seriously. I don't just cry rivers I cry oceans, I cry all seven oceans because sadness is something that consumes me. grief fills my body and flows through my bloodline. on the countless trips to the hospital they put an IV through my arm filled with tears. my only comfort zone is my bathtub. the cold porcelain flooring against my naked body. having warm water flow over the top of my head like a waterfall, a waterfall I've cried so many times. the indent of my body will always remain on my bathtub. the indent consumes my body and holds me so tightly I do not feel the need to move. I feel so comfortable here because it is the only time someone ever holds me. the warm waterfall turns cold and I feel like I'm in my heart. warm surrounded by fluid makes me cold to the bone. I peel myself off of the indented bathroom floor. I lay in bed for hours. my head against my pillow and my body against memory foam mattress that absorbs my body as gravity pulls me down so I cannot move even if I tried. my tears flood my pillows along with muttered screams and sobs. blood stains my blankets along with cigarette burns. I find myself crying an ocean, except the ocean is absorbing my body and I find myself falling so deep in the ocean and I cannot breathe anymore. my lungs feel like they're about to burst like a grenade and my heart is about to give out. the pitter patter my racing heart as it gives its last bout. it surrenders as the waves of the ocean try to mask my carcass. if you ever need me I will be in the sand of the ocean as it is my new bed. the layers of seaweed that will soon form over my lifeless body. I am the only remains from a skeleton sunken city. I am a graveyard that no one comes to visit. my hollow chest feels like a tree that no one notices in a forest. my fingers feel like carrots at the end of a salad bowl no one wants to eat. my blood feels like the last sip of a coffee that no one will drink. so I cry over my unwanted remains. I cry another ocean and find myself in an endless cycle. hopeless and never changing. The ocean has had a very significant role in poetry since the dawn of poetry itself. It’s easy to see why. The ocean — both wild and calm, dangerous and beautiful — is a made up of contradictions and mystery. Ocean poems can not only be dedicated to capturing the heart of sea, but to metaphors for love and trauma, among many other things. More than that, the ocean has played a role in the history of many cultures, making it a setting that is both intimately personal, and vastly universal. Fig. 5. AC 82-7/8, “On this wondrous sea – sailing silently –,” about summer 1858. Courtesy of Amherst College Archives & Special Collections. For link, see: https://acdc.amherst.edu/view/asc:15595/asc:15604 The acrostic form involves the tying together of the poem’s flow with its subject, thus encouraging children to simultaneously consider the meanings, sounds, spellings, and grammatical functions of words. For instance, this summer acrostic poem template will challenge children to think of a sentence which is not only in the summer spirit but also fits the acrostic form. And yet, the cleverness of the imagery is that the pools of fir could be a description of the green sea (resembling fir trees) or a description of actual fir trees whose green pine needles are washing over the mountains. This ambiguity is doubtless deliberate, because it fuses the land and the sea, the water and the trees, in one seamless image, suggesting the longed-for meeting of the two.

Alongside these are bite-sized poetry gems that bring to life the visual feast, the symphony, and the soul-stirring sentiments that only the ocean can inspire.

3. Secrets of the Sea by Mohamed Hassan

Experience Established in 2006, we are one of the longest running online poetry publishers. We have a rich history of publishing popular and high quality contemporary poems not available elsewhere. Our longevity highlights our dedication to poetry and our continued success as a poetry publisher. One of the most famous sea poems in English literature, ‘Sea-Fever’ was published in 1902 in Masefield’s collection Salt-Water Ballads, when the poet was in his mid-twenties. Although its opening line is most familiar as ‘I must go down to the sea again’, it began life in its 1902 incarnation as the slightly odder ‘I must down to the seas again’.

In this oceanic spirit, Nezhukumatathil’s poems wander an abundance of the planet’s most “humming” places, transporting readers from the Pumpkin Festival in Clarence, New York to the existential sadness of a whale washed ashore on Germany’s North Sea coastline—from the Monte San Salvatore funicular in Switzerland to the Harvard Museum of Natural History’s famous Glass Flowers—and from the elephants and bamboo forest of India’s Periyar National Park to the “cicada-electric Mississippi night.” Likewise, they devote considerable attention to spaces and places that hum in quieter ways: a fresh manicure, a shared brambleberry tart, a childhood bedroom, Prince’s “Starfish and Coffee.” These, without exception, are poems replete with images that last and linger: “the toothy grin of an apple-fed horse,” “the penny-taste of the garden hose,” the “blush-green current of auroras across [a penguin’s] claws.” The ocean is a calm, serene and beautiful work of nature that can evoke tranquility. We hope you found these poems exciting. from the poetic structures that cultivate dazzling settings to the metaphors that brim with possibility, Oceanic… reawakens my curiosity for a world that still holds so many undiscovered wonders.” — Literary Review Her poems invoke a sense of connectedness… Nezhukumatathil weaves meditations on parenting and family-making among her lavishly rendered evocations of flora and fauna… Nezhukumatathil’s voice is consistent in its awe.” — Publishers Weekly Life thrills in the shallows as well as the deep. The glory of the foreshore is celebrated in Of Sea, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s bestiary of the intertidal zone. Mud shrimp drifting with the tide float in “silk light”; ragworm, burrowing in estuarine mud, shimmer “in all the love of being”.This word mat of under-the-sea adjectives will be a perfect complement to this resource, helping to build a broader range of vocabulary. Oceanic is a generous, romantic, and ambitious look at the different stages of life, and how we experience the love and wonder that lead us to become more fully realized and compassionate as we grow each decade… [it’s] Nezhukumatathil’s most cohesive collection to date, as she takes her prior preoccupations and dissects them in new ways that invite, as all of her work does, a sense of marvel and astonishment.” — Tin House These enchanting verses will transport you to a world where love and the sea intertwine, evoking feelings of passion and the eternal ebb and flow of the heart. “Sea Lyric” by William Stanley Braithwaite The loss of indigenous cultures washes away whole worlds. Among the Inupiaq of Alaska, seals, whales and seabirds are people. Even “Oil is a People,” writes Inupiaq poet dg nanouk okpik. Throughout her collection Corpse Whale, okpik uses a split pronoun, “she/I”, to express this sense of shared personhood. “Will they crawl around her / me, sink their eyeteeth in the sea,” she asks in If Oil is Drilled in Bristol Bay. But poetry isn’t science; not bound simply to report on the state of things, poetry is free to imagine what could be In the 1960s and 1970s, students and faculty at the newly established University of Papua New Guinea and the University of the South Pacific in Fiji begin to study, write, and publish poetry and stories in broadsides, chapbooks, zines, anthologies, and full-length collections. Other centers of Pacific poetry soon emerged across the Pacific, including Aoteaora (New Zealand), Samoa, Tonga, Hawaiʻi, Tahiti, and Guam. Today, several Pacific writers have become internationally renowned, and their work has been translated into multiple languages and media, including film. Pacific literature courses are now taught in high schools and colleges throughout Oceania, and there are publishers and literary journals dedicated wholly to Pacific writing. Several dissertations, theses, essays, and monographs have focused on the history, theory, and aesthetics of Pacific literature. Book festivals, reading series, open mics, spoken word slams, writing workshops, humanities councils, author retreats, and literary conferences have created a dynamic and vibrant Pacific literary scene.