For our short paper, we had to compare two poems. The good news is, I found two that were short enough and similar enough to discuss in the allotted word count. The bad news is that I soon discovered that I really only wanted to write about one of them. Nevertheless, I gritted my teeth and gave roughly equal time to both. Here is the result:
Tolkien’s poems “The Lonely Isle” and “The Happy Mariners” each explore the theme of exclusion, the speaker’s sense that he is barred from a place he greatly desires.[1] In both, this is achieved by creating a sense of isolation and loneliness, which at first seems directed elsewhere (the titular isle or a western tower) but is revealed to inhere in the speaker. The theme of exclusion is further supported, in “Happy Mariners,” by the tantalizing faintness of the sounds or signs of Faërie, which only makes the speaker’s sense of exclusion more poignant.
The first half of the initial stanza of “Happy Mariners” depicts an isolated tower which is exposed to the “celestial seas” (l. 2). The tower is physically isolated, as it stands on a “dark rock” with the sea “washing round” it (l. 9). The word “lonely” gains prominence from the repeated “l” sounds in stressed syllables, as the tower “glimmers like a spike of lonely
pearl” (l. 7).[2] The “lō” sound in the word “forlorn” (l. 8) hearkens back to
the word “lonely” in both sound and sense, but also alliterates with the
stressed rhyming word “fade”
at the line’s end (l. 8). The long vowel
sounds and soft consonants in these three linked words (lōnely, fōrlōrn,
fāde)
help create a slow, mournful sound. The
segment ends with the poem’s first rhyming couplet (stands/lands), drawing
attention to the speaker’s observation that “fairy boats go
by to gloaming lands” (l. 10). The alliteration and iambic beats put greater
stress on “by” than might be seen in prose, making clear the tower is not
itself a destination; the boats “go by” on their way somewhere more desirable
and do not stop there. Indeed, the words
in this final line are aurally interconnected, creating a sense of forward
movement that subtly supports the idea of fairy boats passing by; there is repeated
assonance with the long “ō” sound (boats, go, gloaming)
and consonance with the “l” (gloaming lands).
Thus far,
the speaker has coyly described the tower at a distance, starting with “I know
a window in a western tower” (l. 1), as if he has merely heard about it, or has
been there occasionally. Only in the
second stanza does he reveal his own connection with the tower: “While I alone
look out behind the Moon / From in my white and windy tower” (ll. 25-26). With these lines, he definitively associates
himself with the isolation of the tower: it is “my [...] tower,” though “white
and windy” rather than comfortable, and “I alone look out” from it. He feels keenly the separation from the “happy
mariners” (l. 20) who go where he cannot, to the “Islands blest” (l. 34).
The speaker
in “Lonely Isle,” by contrast, addresses the desired land directly as an
“island [...] sea-girdled and alone” (l. 1). In each verse’s second line, the speaker
describes the land as “a gleam of white rock” in the distance (ll. 2, 14), which
he sees “through a sunny haze” (l. 2) and “over sundering seas” (l. 14). “Sundering” suggests the seas are too rough to
cross, as if violently cutting off the island from the rest of the world,
leaving it isolated and thus “alone.” These
lines create an initial impression that the island is distant (it is seen
through a “haze” like objects on the horizon seen through earth’s atmosphere) and
perhaps even uninhabited – after all, a “white rock” most readily “gleam[s]” in the sun if it is perfectly bare.[3]
Gradually, however,
a sense of the speaker’s exclusion, rather than the island’s isolation, builds
through repetition and recasting of words.
The title and first line set an initial expectation that the island is
“lonely”; it is “sea-girdled and alone” (l. 1).
But a soft, repeated “w” sound (white, whispering, wailing,
sea-wingèd, wheel, outward) introduces
a melancholy mood in the second half of the stanza (ll. 7-12) as the speaker
describes a “lamentable host” of sea birds (l. 9) with their “wailing” (l. 8)
and “sad whistling” (l. 11). The last
line of the stanza – prominent as part of the terminating rhymed couplet (grey/way)
– offers a sudden, jarring personification: the sea birds “wheel about my
lonely outward way” (l. 12). In the
phrase “my lonely outward way,” the speaker unexpectedly takes ownership of his
own loneliness, using the possessive (“my”), even as he projects it onto the
sea birds’ circling. Likewise, the “sunny
haze” of a land glimpsed on the horizon, which in the first stanza could be a
mundane atmospheric effect, becomes “a mist of tears” (l. 15) in the second
stanza. This now suggests the speaker is
weeping at his forced separation, as if cleaved by the “sundering seas” (l. 14). The island’s edge is, to the speaker, a
“forbidden marge” (l. 13). The second
stanza thus reveals it is actually the speaker who is lonely, excluded, and
forbidden access.
In “Happy
Mariners,” the sense of exclusion is further heightened by the faintness and
uncertainty of the sounds from the desired place and the mariners’ one-way
journey there. In particular, the speaker
is not sure what he is hearing: “maybe, ’tis a throbbing silver lyre, / Or
voices of grey sailors [... ] / For often seems there ring of feet and song /
Or twilit twinkle of a trembling gong” (ll. 14-15, 18-19). Both “maybe”
and “seem” carry beats in these iambic
lines. With “maybe,” the speaker tentatively
introduces two alternatives; he cannot discern if he hears strumming of a
musical instrument or voices of “grey sailors” (ll. 14-15). The word “grey” to describe the sailors
suggests they are somehow faded, as if by age or even by death; the voices
could be haunting, even ghostly. The
lyre, by contrast, suggests a material, physical instrument and a living
poet/bard to play it, and thus the warmth of companionship. Ordinarily, the sound of feet, song, or gong could
easily be distinguished from other sounds, but the speaker does not trust his
powers of identification; these merely “seem” the sounds he has heard (ll.
18-19). Likewise, as the happy mariners
go by, the speaker hears “chanting snatches of a mystic tune” as
if the sound is coming in and out of range, rather than merely growing closer
and then more distant, as would be normal in the mundane world (l. 28). All these tantalizing hints of what he is
missing make his longing more acute.
By
contrast, the speaker in “Lonely Isle” somehow knows the “shores [are] all full
of music” (l. 16), that fairies dance “to soft airs their harps and viols
weave” (l. 20), and that a bell in “a high inland tower” peals and echoes
“through the lighted elms” at evening (ll. 23-24). These sounds are not a matter of uncertainty
or doubt, although the speaker’s source of information is not revealed. In other words, his longing appears to be triggered
by clear awareness of what he is missing, rather than by hints or hopes.
Both poems
thus explore similar themes of isolation and loneliness, with a characteristic
shift in perspective to reveal the speaker’s sense that he is being denied
access to Faërie; he is left behind in mortal lands while others dwell in
bliss. The initial focus on the tower in
“Happy Mariners” makes for a subtle shift; the tower’s loneliness in its
exposure to the celestial seas becomes the speaker’s exclusion, as if he can
get no closer than the tower to the Islands blest. The initial focus on the island in “Lonely
Isle” becomes mere reversal of perspective; the reader is initially led to
believe the isle is remote and girdled by seas, but in fact, the speaker
experiences this as a sundering or exclusion of himself. While both speakers describe wonders from
which they are excluded in the course of each poem, the effect of the
half-heard, half-grasped sounds in “Happy Mariners” suggests an inchoate
longing and thus an exclusion that is ultimately more complex and more haunting
than that described in “Lonely Isle.”
Works
Cited
Tolkien, J.
R. R. “The Happy Mariners.” The Book
of Lost Tales, Part Two, edited by Christopher Tolkien, 1st American ed.,
Houghton Mifflin, 1984, pp. 273-74. The
History of Middle-earth, v.2.
---. “The Lonely Isle” in John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of
Middle-earth, Kindle ed., Mariner Books, 2005.
Notes
[1] For simplicity, I refer to the speaker as male, like the poem’s author. However, the poems offer no cues that would dictate the speaker’s gender.
[2] Where needed, italics denotes a stressed rhyming word at the end of a line, underline marks a repeated sound in a line, and bold marks a stressed syllable.
[3] Of course, this impression proves incorrect, as it is inhabited by “children robed in flowers” (l. 17) and “fairies” (l. 19), and contains a citadel with a bell tower (ll. 22, 24).
