Summary
"Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening" begins by describing the way fog and vapors linger over the craggy shoreline. The night begins silently, except for the rhythmic roaring of the ocean's waves hitting rocks. There is also the sound, in the far distance, of sailors' voices calling to one another, telling people who have been working that it is their turn to rest. A single voice calls out the time and orders the ship's bell to be rung.
Analysis
Charlotte Smith performs a strange and subtle maneuver in this poem. The speaker begins by assuring us that the ocean scene is silent, almost a void with no detectable imagery. The rest of the stanza, however, consists of a list of exceptions to this rule. The exceptions are all auditory images. Therefore, while the only visual imagery we get is that of darkness and mist, we are treated to three layers of sound, each one sharper, louder, and more specific than the next. We begin with the "repercussive roar" of the ocean, a dull background sound that fits well with the vague, mysterious image of "vapours." Not only is the word "roar" onomatopoetic, but the word "repercussive" is the poem's longest, with four syllables. This long word, and the alliteration of the phrase "repercussive roar," mimic the repetitive, undefined rhythm of the ocean waves. The next aural image Smith offers is that of "seamen in the anchored bark that tell / the watch relieved." This depiction of human voices gets layered on top of the image of roaring water, creating a kind of rich auditory landscape for readers even while visually depriving us. Finally, at the very top of this auditory landscape sits the image of "one deep voice alone / Singing the hour, and bidding 'Strike the bell!'" In contrast to the relatively indefinite image of seamen's voices, these lines pinpoint a single specific voice, even telling us about its pitch, and then directly quoting its words. By pointing out and personalizing a single individual's voice, the poem hints at a connection between its unnamed speaker and this distant caller. At the same time, they remain separated by distance and unable to see one another. In this poem, sound travels through space, creating fleeting links between strangers. Yet visual sensation divides them, filling that space with fog and darkness. This creates an odd blend of sensory deprivation and sensory overload, in which the visual—the sense we usually use to orient ourselves—gives way almost entirely to the auditory. Without departing at all from reality, we enter an otherworldly, bewildering scene.
Though we know our speaker is present at the scene being described (for one thing, the title tells us this), they are more or less invisible. There's no "I" here, no mention of the speaker's body. They become a kind of disembodied set of ears, with the passive voice further alienating the speaker's voice from any discernible bodily presence. The phrase "Save where is heard" is the only suggestion that somebody is actually present, perceiving the scene through their own senses—and yet, because it introduces this idea through a passive voice, it avoids mention of the actual subject. This makes the scene all the stranger. While the speaker is our point of connection to the scene, guiding us through, they seem to have lost awareness of their own body. Other bodies, like those of the voices calling in the distance, feel more real and solid. Yet again, without portraying anything explicitly fantastical, Charlotte Smith creates an almost magical and somewhat frightening scene, disorienting us from even the sensation of having a body in space. Sound becomes our only tool for understanding the world around us and our relationship to it.
Formally, we can see that these lines fall into two segments. They each consist of ten syllables, with the stress falling on every other syllable starting with the second one in each line. In other words, they're written in iambic pentameter, the most common meter in English poetry. The first four lines are linked by the rhymed ending sounds "shore," "mute," "roar," and "foot." In other words, they have an ABAB rhyme scheme (although "mute" and "foot" are slant rhymes, coming close to rhyming but not quite getting there). Another set of ending sounds takes hold in lines 5-8: "tone," "tell," "alone," and "bell." While the ABAB rhymes accompany descriptions of silence and roaring waves, the CDCD sounds describe human voices. Thus, the shift in rhyme accompanies a slight shift in content.
