Break, Break, Break
A lyric poem in four quatrains. The opening line, “Break, break, break,” returns at the start of the final stanza. Within each quatrain the second and fourth lines rhyme, and those two lines are set indented beneath the first and third.
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.O, well for the fisherman's boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O, well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.
Alfred Tennyson was born in 1809 in Somersby, Lincolnshire, and became one of the most widely read poets of Victorian England.[2] He succeeded William Wordsworth as Poet Laureate in 1850 and held the post until his death in 1892.[2] “Break, Break, Break” was first published in his two-volume Poems of 1842.[1] The poem is associated with the death of Arthur Henry Hallam, Tennyson's close friend from his Cambridge years, who died in 1833.[2]
The Gulf Stream
A man lies on the deck of a small sailing boat whose mast has snapped off, leaving a broken stump and loose rope. The boat sits low in dark, rolling water. In the foreground several sharks swim close to the hull, one with its mouth open. Near the right edge a waterspout twists down from the clouds, and on the far horizon at the upper left a ship is faintly visible. Red stalks of sugarcane lie on the deck beside the man.
Winslow Homer (1836–1910) was an American painter known for his marine subjects.[2] He painted The Gulf Stream in 1899 and reworked it before it entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1906.[1] The Museum acquired it through the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Wolfe Fund.[1] It remains in the collection and is offered as open access in the public domain.[1]
The Great Wave, Sète
A horizontal seascape. The horizon runs low across the frame, dividing a broad sky of banked clouds from the sea below. Sunlight breaks through the clouds and falls in a pale band on the water. At the right a large wave breaks against a stone jetty that angles out into the sea.
Gustave Le Gray (1820–1884) was a French photographer celebrated for his seascapes.[1] To make such views he often printed the sky and the sea from separate negatives, joining them in a single print.[2] The Great Wave, Sète dates to 1857, and prints are held by several museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum.[2]