Chapter 15: Return In the final chapter, Carson again shares the beauty she finds in the sea: Before the eyes of the eels, clouds of copepods vibrated in their ceaseless dance of life, their crystal bodies catching the light like dust motes when the blue gleam came down from above. (p. 143) She ends the…
Author: Margaret Coombs
Poetry, curiosity, place.
Under the Sea-Wind, Day 16
Chapter 14, Winter Haven Today’s reading brought a big surprise: Carson broke her scientific viewpoint. All along, in every chapter, I’ve learned about wildlife living and dying, eating and being eaten. Carson presents the cycle of life as a passing tableau. Big fish eat little fish. Big birds eat fish. Fishermen catch fish to be…
Under the Sea-Wind, Day 15
Book III: River and Sea. Chapter 13, Journey to the Sea. We meet a new named character in Chapter 13: an eel named Anguilla. Ten years old, she lives in Bittern Pond, but is soon to make her journey to the sea. For the first time in her adult life, the food hunger was forgotten….
Under the Sea-Wind, Day 14
Chapter 12: Seine Haul Another apex predator arrives: MAN. I would call them human beings, but it’s very likely that only men stood on that fishing boat at night, watching fish disturb millions of luminous plankton animals, causing them to glow with a fierce luster. So the darkness of the moonless night was broken in…
Under the Sea-Wind, Day 13
Chapter 11: Indian Summer This book is a long prose poem, full of imagery, compressed, lyrical, sonic. Just to highlight its beauty, I formed a sentence found on page 106 into a poem by adding line breaks, removing transitions, adding and removing propositions, and substituting a common name for a scientific one (pteropod). But no….