The classic ocean poetry taking on troubling new meanings

We hear the call of the sea in poems from Coleridge and Eliot to Kathy Jetn?il-Kijiner, but those words also sound a warning - if only we would listenTS Eliot wrote The Dry Salvages as second world war bombs fell on London. The poem imagines humanity adrift in a leaky boat, the sea "all about us". But poetry, like the sea, is never still. "Where is there an end to the drifting wreckage," the poem asks. The answer: "There is no end, but addition" reads differently in 2022 than in 1941, as 12m tonnes of plastic are added to the oceans each year.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. Continue reading...