The Happy Mariners vs The Lonely Isle

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).