Under the Sea-wind: A Naturalist's Picture of Ocean Life

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Quaratiello, Arlene. Rachel Carson: A Biography. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2004, pp. 26–27. ISBN 0-313-32388-7. Rachel Carson, writer, scientist, and ecologist, grew up simply in the rural river town of Springdale, Pennsylvania. Her mother bequeathed to her a life-long love of nature and the living world that Rachel expressed first as a writer and later as a student of marine biology. Carson graduated from Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham University) in 1929, studied at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, and received her MA in zoology from Johns Hopkins University in 1932. After a tour of some of the ocean’s most unusual and dazzling creatures, Carson considers the glorious and inevitable interconnectedness of the natural world, no different from the “inescapable network of mutuality” which Martin Luther King so passionately championed in the human world. She writes:

From the original review of Under the Sea Wind by Rachel Carson in The Louisville Courier-Journal, January 11, 1942: “The Sea’s Eternal Drama” It can be challenging to read what we are so accustomed to seeing visually. However, Carson's narration is spectacular, taking the reader through ecosystems with the animals themselves as characters. I would say that Caron's writing actually eclipses nature film: it allows to push deeper beyond the exciting, shimmering tilt of a school of fish to contemplate the entirety of Nature's magical production, past, present and future. Rachel Carson: The Sea Trilogy is kept in print by a gift to the Guardians of American Letters Fund from The Gould Family Foundation, which also provided project support for the volume. Such visions of the sea’s colossal fecundity run through not just Under the Sea-Wind but all of The Sea Trilogy and play a crucial role in it. They are occasions for metaphor and figurative analogy, for micro- and macrocos­mic parallels, and perhaps above all for syntactical rhythms that pulse and flow majestically—like the ocean itself. Don’t try to scan it as poetry, just read it aloud to yourself and listen.

According to Brooks, Carson requested that a piece of her writing about the sea be read at the funeral. The selection—which ultimately wasn’t read, though it’s not clear why—came from a coda to The Edge of the Sea that’s pure poetic flourish reminiscent of a sermon, which speaks of distant coasts “made one by the unifying touch of the sea” and “the stream of life, flowing as inexorably as any ocean current, from past to unknown future.”

Under the Sea-Wind reveals Carson’s literary genius. Through clear language, personification, and vivid description, she brings the ocean to us on land. Under the Sea-Wind is the deepest immersion in the sea without going scuba diving. Long before scientists like pioneering oceanographer Sylvia “Her Deepness” Earle plunged into the depths of the ocean, Carson shepherds the human imagination to the mysterious wonderland thriving below the surface of the seas that envelop Earth:Miss Carson is by training a zoologist; yet, unlike most scientists, she is a talented writer as she so thoroughly proves in this, her first book. A true lover of the sea, she tells with scientific accuracy of the life of the Atlantic coast, from the soaring gulls on high to the forms that creep over the continental slopeand down into the perpetual darkness of the ocean’s abyss.

According to environmental engineer and Carson scholar H. Patricia Hynes, "Silent Spring altered the balance of power in the world. No one since would be able to sell pollution as the necessary underside of progress so easily or uncritically." Rachel Carson writes about the sea, the sand, the birds, fish and the smallest of creatures and organisms in a way that makes us realise how little we observe of what is occurring around us, though we may stand, swim, float or fish in the midst of it. For the sea, its shore and the air above thrum like a thriving city of predator and prey of all sizes and character, constantly fluctuating, its citizens ever alert to when it is prudent to move and when it is necessary to be still. Lear, Linda. Under the Sea-Wind. RachelCarson.org. http://www.rachelcarson.org/UnderTheSeaWind.aspx Though not nearly as renowned as Carson’s classic Silent Spring (1962), Under the Sea Wind has in its quiet way stood the test of time. it has been reissued in several editions by various publishers since its debut. It was the first in what became known as Rachel Carson’s “Sea Trilogy.”Carson assigns names to the creatures. Often she uses the scientific names of species as character names. It is a great technique and coupled with her engaging writing you follow each one with rapt interest. I thought this would be childish but it wasn't. The vocabulary is too advanced and the scientific details too plentiful for the lines to feel childish. Everybody, even expert naturalists, will learn something new. If you cannot open a .mobi file on your mobile device, please use .epub with an appropriate eReader. This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker. The thump of specificity here, giving the skimmer its Latinate genus name Rynchops, is welcome, after all the anonymity preceding it. The unidentified bird may seem “strange” at first, but with its nesting grounds nearby, this is clearly its habitat. Note how it arrives with the dusk, i.e., it behaves in concert with or response to the waning light, and its steady “progress” across the sound is analogous—“as measured and as meaningful”—as that of the shadows. What may be meaningful in the skimmer’s flight, in other words, is similarly meaningful in the steadily changing shadows. There is a stately persistence here, a sense of unwa­vering purpose, in this measured and unhurried movement. Note too that we are invited to measure the skimmer’s wingspread, “more than the length of a man’s arm,” against our own—yet a further unobtrusive but inescapable analogy. If I read these passages as if they were poetry, that is because they are. Upon reading the book one has the feeling of being an invisible spectator of an eternal drama that began million of years ago and which promises to continue indefinitely, heedless of man and his exploitation of the continents. It is the same feeling one achieves when alone on a starry night he gazes upward into the immensity of space.

Much more—one beautiful passage after another, in fact—might be quoted from this chapter as it rises to its peroration—tide pools have very nearly taken over the whole book. And why not? So many of Carson’s deepest reflections are here. A variety of groups ranging from government institutions to environmental and conservation organizations to scholarly societies have celebrated Carson's life and work since her death. Perhaps most significantly, on June 9, 1980, Carson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States. A 17¢ Great Americans series postage stamp was issued in h to make the sea and its life as vivid a reality for those who may read the book as it has become for me during the past decade.

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In detailing a tern’s relationship to the sea (a type of seabird), Carson indirectly and perfectly characterizes the human-sea relationship: The water in which they lived was so clear as to be invisible to my eyes; I could detect the interface between air and water only by the sense of coldness on my finger-tips. The crystal water was filled with sunshine—an infusion and distillation of light that reached down and surrounded each of these small but resplendent shellfish with its glowing radiance. Meanwhile the fish, drained of life by separation from water, grew limp as all its struggles ceased. Like a mist gathering on a clear glass surface, a film clouded its eyes. Soon the iridescent greens and golds that made its body, in life, a thing of beauty had faded to dullness.