"The Solemn Sea," Jeremiah Webster

Somewhere along the way, we have come to believe that a poet’s natural habitat is a coffee shop where—maintained and caffeinated by well-trained baristas—he can brood in private and pace his mind in tiny circles without breaking free to harm the general populace. So when Mr. Webster came to town, it seemed only fitting—however stereotypical—to meet him where he might feel most at home and discuss his latest poem: “The Solemn Sea” (Relief Journal: Spring 2019). But how to talk about the infinite depth of the wine dark sea while tinny tunes pumped through speakers just above our heads? We shared a laugh over the irony of exploring “dark sayings of old” [i] while John Bellion serenaded us with his hit song, “JT."

 Lay me down, put me out
Call me home, let me know
I'm ready to go
'Cause I was down, now, I've flown
Oh, what's reality lately?

Bellion’s driving question—“What’s reality lately?”—reflects our society-wide aimlessness. We are metaphysically adrift with no intention to course correct. Webster told me of a time several years ago when he and his son entered a hotel lobby at a party’s zenith. Music thumped. Beer flowed. They stood at the door for a moment surveying this bacchanalian ecstasy when a woman lunged past them to throw up into a garbage can. “What do you think of all this?” Mr. Webster asked his little boy. His son’s wise response was surprising, a perceptive appraisal of our cultural gestalt: “I think there is no silence here for God,” he said. And the coffee shop speakers keep pumping the solution according to Bellion:

Those thoughts can get confusing, it's amusing
But tonight, we celebrate (hey, hey, hey, hey).

T.S. Eliot says we are “distracted from distraction by distraction, filled with fancies and empty of meaning.” [ii] So we throw our hands in the air and grind the night away while the disc jockey drops the latest beats. And we have good cause to avoid "the silences of these infinite spaces.” [iii] They terrify us. They are the deep end of the pool to our childish souls. Something within us knows that God will meet us in the depths and who can be prepared for that meeting, however inevitable it is? Webster’s convictions run along Augustinian lines, so he believes that “God has set eternity in our hearts” [iv] where “deep calls to deep.” [v] But we cannot heed what we cannot hear and so we stand in the shallows, neglecting generations of voices who might lead us into deeper waters. In his poem, Webster asks:

Who is my sister-brother
if the democracy of the dead 
has no vote, if the tears of Priam
are somehow less
than a Twitter feed?

“The Solemn Sea” is not a poem for the casual reader. I don’t mean to suggest that it is esoteric, but it is a weighty and layered poem bemoaning a people given over to “unreal industries” who, drunk on their own vanity, "throw stones at the dead.” Those who want to explore “The Solemn Sea” and its seven parts might want a topographical map and a flashlight. Here it is:

Part one provides a 50,000-foot vision of a world enslaved by industry where “pale fish, eyes no longer sea nymph enchanted, hang on a dead current.” In this opening, the narrator shares concerns with the likes of Wordsworth and Eliot who watched industrialization rob us of our sightedness and concern for the soul.

Part two telescopes the lens onto an academic who mourns industrialization, but whose books “are quaint, kitsch in their commitment to dust . . . She reads in possession, possessed by dead oracles.” She is trying to touch the infinite with twenty-six letters bereft of the divine breath.

Part three is a war of chess pieces (The Lewis chessmen, to be specific) who serve as types and shadows of the political realm, a realm that “builds up and knocks down civilizations, one after the other, one upon the other, into the same nothings.” [vi] Francois Mauriac, the French novelist and essayist, believed that “God does not manifest Himself in politics save by the terrible fruits of His absence” [vii] and this part of the poem seems to echo that conviction. Here, "the Queen clutches her ornate throne" while "knights and bishops of another hue ready arms” and the “King observes the scene in mild stupefaction.”

Part four swoops over “hills green, gold, auburn” where “grain elevators rise like shipwrecks. A windmill keeps pace with a wind gust serpentine from a road of fallen apples to a rare meeting of trees.” This is the land of Webster’s childhood, but even in this agrarian haven, tombstones and their names “fade with each passing harvest.” Even the land conspires to bury the wisdom of our fathers and mothers—that great cloud of witnesses described in the book of Hebrews and those whom Chesterton called “the Democracy of the dead.” [viii]

Part five is a short aside, the telling of a maritime tale that forces the reader to reckon with providence. More than a little tongue in cheek, Webster blames the twists of fate on the "fickle prejudice of Poseidon’s domain!” Here, he troubles us like a Jeremiad, daring us to ask the hard questions of a God who answers the desperate prayers of sailors trapped with an eel in their cargo by flooding the ship and drowning every man on board. But which of us will ask the hard questions? Which of us will attend to the answers God gives in His word?

Part six describes the poet himself confronted by his mediocre intellect and fierce desire and vain self-love. Like Hamlet, he entertains suicide as an escape from this beleaguered life where “words, words, words” [ix] carry as little weight as the life he leads. His passions are paltry and petty. That is why Webster closes the first six parts of his seven-part poem with this line: “The solemn sea is no longer wine dark.”

This refrain calls to mind Odysseus in The Iliad, standing before “the wine dark sea.” Scholars have long debated oinopa, the word often translated “wine-dark.” Did Homer use it to fill the line’s rhythmic demands? Was the sea literally wine dark because the setting sun reflected off its surface? [x]  Webster has given the word a layered meaning, calling to mind a Eucharistic wisdom that Homer could only foreshadow. What sets Webster’s prophetic voice apart from the likes of Homer or Wordsworth is his distinctly Christian appeal found in part seven:

The God of us all
sustains the depths of the sea,
hangs His wings in satisfaction over the world
He has made.

The God of us all
consumes creation’s diminished return,
the nature study war grave vessel love-wreck
of our solitary way.

The God of us all
is the same God
some believe
walks upon waves,

broods over waters,
until the solemn sea is wine dark
once more. 

The casual reader might confuse the “God” in these lines of poetry to the powerless, non-incarnated, faceless god of modernity, but to my knowledge, only one God walked on water: Jesus, the Christ. According to Webster, this God is our only hope to regain a wine-dark sea. The Jesus he alludes to liked a party like any man and even helped the party along, [xi] but he is not a happy-clappy god who throws his hands in the air and grinds the night away. He is a glad blood sacrifice, an enigma, a mystery, a rascal who prefers to meet us in the darkness. [xii]

The night is far spent and we stagger like drunken sailors lost at sea on a rolling ship. We would rather not discover how deep the ocean is beneath us. We would rather not look overboard to see how dark its waters. I am no different. In an attempt to put off further discussion of such weighty matters, I asked Mr. Webster where he was born. Surely the most benign of questions, perhaps surpassed only by, “How ‘bout this weather, huh?” I was unprepared for the depth of his answer.

Webster's mother was a college student when he was conceived. Her father threatened her with exile unless she aborted the fetus. She went to the clinic and scheduled the appointment for the next day. At the time, she was enrolled in a philosophy class and had read about Aristotle’s exploration of the human soul and his notion of Entelechy, the idea that mere matter needs a certain form or function to complete it. In this respect, the human soul is a seed bearing great potential but requires a form to be fully realized. She realized that what she carried inside her womb was a seed, not simply a bundle of expendable cells, and so she decided to bring this seed to term and risk her father’s rejection. He was a man of his word. Mr. Webster’s life—and all it has come to carry since—was only hours from being aborted.

During the remainder of her pregnancy, she read T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” “Ash Wednesday,” and passages from the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) out loud. When he was born, she put her little boy up for adoption. A pastor and his wife took him into their home and raised him up in the Christian faith. While Jeremiah Webster enjoyed the shelter of a happy home, his birth mother succumbed to postpartum depression. In her despair, she discovered a rabbi named Jesus who honored women like no other rabbi or philosophy she had ever studied.

Unbeknownst to her, the little boy she brought into the world was falling in love with philosophy and literature and when he first read T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” at Whitworth University, he felt such resonance with the poem that he decided to make a life’s study of Eliot’s work. [xiii] Years later, he sought ordination as a deacon in the Anglican Church of North America. Little did he know that his mother had read Eliot and the BCP out loud to him while she carried him in her womb. Little did he know the mysterious web of circumstances that would unite them three decades later.

When I heard his story that day in Starbucks, I was dumbstruck. Behold, I was suddenly Odysseus standing before a wine-dark sea, face to face with the incomprehensible. I trembled at this glimpse behind the curtain, a glimpse that revealed the work of the “immortal, invisible, God only wise." Truth is stranger than fiction. These are the deep things, the realizations that God does, indeed, hang His wings in satisfaction over the world He has made.

In one respect, this poem is a finger in the dyke, an attempt to ward off the cultural onslaught against wisdom or the misguided belief that wisdom can be downloaded in a linear exchange. Wisdom is found in wisdom himself, Jesus, and our growing indifference to him signifies a growing indifference to wisdom. “The Solemn Sea” is Mr. Webster’s attempt to call us back to wisdom and wisdom's sacramental view of the world. It is his attempt to describe the indescribable, a testament to the mysterious ways of God. His is a Quixotic hope that he and his readers would come to a deeper knowledge of the Deus absconditus, the hidden God, [xiv] who holds all things together and whose blood darkens the world like wine. His is a hope that we would believe in the soul and tend to it, that we would live more than an animal existence. Our petty passions and hustling to nowhere may blind our sightedness to these realities, but they cannot nullify their existence. Jim Elliot once said that “the Devil has made it his business to monopolize on three elements: noise, hurry, and crowds. [xv] If he was right, then we should urgently and soberly evaluate our liturgies of lust.

Let me briefly touch on the middle word in the title of this poem: solemn. In the short time I spent with Jeremiah Webster, he did not strike me as a solemn person. He was insightful, even earnest, yes, but not pensive or humorless. He laughed a lot so I don’t think he is calling us to a grim existence. But this poem is a call to sober up, to stop chasing cars like mangy dogs, to take God seriously, to give our existence deeper consideration. Like Bob Dylan, Webster is reminding us that we gonna serve somebody. It may be the Devil or it may be the Lord, but we’re gonna serve someone.

He joins his voice to the likes of Homer, Wordsworth, Eliot who prophesied against our kingdom of bling and blab. This prophetic stance is a noble responsibility, requiring great eloquence and even greater courage. While the rest of us have grown comfortable with all this ugly indifference, Webster has decided to trace the works of Grace and invite us to join him in doing so. As T.S. Eliot once wrote, “Most people are only a very little alive; and to awaken them to the spiritual is a very great responsibility.” [xvi] Webster has accepted that mantle of responsibility and “The Solemn Sea” is his call to finally live.

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Ben Palpant has written several books, including A Small Cup of Light and Sojourner Songs. He received his undergraduate degree from Whitworth University and currently works at The Oaks Classical Christian Academy. Palpant lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and five children. You can find out more about his work on his website and Amazon page.

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[i] Psalm 78:2

[ii] “The Four Quartets,” T.S. Eliot

[iii] Pensees, Pascal

[iv] Ecclesiastes 3:11

[v] Psalm 42:7

[vi] Letters on Art and Literature, p. 36, Francois Mauriac

[vii] ibid

[viii] Orthodoxy, chapter 4, G.K. Chesterton

[ix] Hamlet, Act 2.2, William Shakespeare

[x] The discussion is explored well in “A Winelike Sea” by Caroline Alexander: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/sea/winelike-sea

[xi] John 2

[xii] Hosea 2:14 and Isaiah 50:10-11

[xiii] Jeremiah wrote a critical introduction to Eliot’s work in 2013 (Paradise in The Wasteland / Wiseblood Books)

[xiv] Isaiah 45:15

[xv] The Shadow of the Almighty: the life and testament of Jim Elliot, by Elizabeth Elliot

[xvi] After Strange God, T.S. Eliot