Of Reef Tackles and Halyards: “Marine Language” and the Technologies of Immediacy in William Falconer's The Shipwreck

The power of the shipwreck motif in William Falconer's The Shipwreck derives in part from an oscillation between, on the one hand, the tragic distance of the spectator or reader from the unfolding catastrophe, and, on the other, a sense of immediacy produced by the poem's representations of the desperate struggle for life aboard that distant ship. In Falconer's best-selling poem, the speaker frets over the challenge of making remote, unseen sailors present to readers on land. To meet this challenge, the goddess Memory must fly “o'er th'immensity of space” (A, 1:116).¹ Yet it is not only temporal and spatial distance that separates the mariners from many readers. The sailors’ experience and knowledge, too, the very particularity of the things and actions on their ship, are unfamiliar to landlubbers. Memory, the speaker promises, will rescue the sailors, their lives and experiences, from “oblivion,” a term that appears frequently in...