Whispers by Edwina Stanton Babcock
"Whispers" by Edwina Stanton Babcock is a lyrical poem that evokes the maritime heritage and restless spirit of New England, centering on the island community of Nantucket and its deep, generational entanglement with the sea and the wider world beyond American shores. The poem opens with a repeated, haunting question: what was it the wind said, blowing from the Orient toward the landmarks of New England — the cross on the hill and the sails of the mill — at twilight? This question frames the entire work, suggesting that some wordless, irresistible message has always traveled across the ocean to stir the hearts of New Englanders. The wind blowing from the East carries a dreamy, mysterious quality. It sings a low and strange song over the sea, and the islanders feel its pull instinctively, exchanging knowing glances. Young men are seized by visions of enterprise and adventure. In response, ships set sail from the shores, and wives are left standing alone in doorways, watching the white sails disappear into the silver sound and beyond. The sailors press outward into storms and do not turn back, drawn irresistibly by the call of the old world, the dim and distant world, to New England's sons. The poem then shifts its gaze inward, to the domestic spaces left behind by those voyagers. In old houses with wide chimneys, young wives gather by the fireside and speak to strangers. The walls and shelves of these homes are decorated with the exotic objects the sailors brought home: Delft pottery, lacquered trays, jades, teakwood, teapots, fans, china, tortoiseshell, pearl, and ivory carved as finely as lace. Hidden in secret places are fabrics from distant lands — chuddah, cashmere, sandalwood-scented cloth — silent testimony to the far reaches the men traveled and the worlds they touched. The young wives, described as frank and open, speak of what they know and sense without fully being able to explain. No one could guess how the sailors knew to go, or what exactly the wind had said to summon them. The merchants are dead, the sailors gone, but the memory of the toppling summer sea and the pale blue winter ocean returned again and again through the years, which rolled by like sails being furled. Men died at sea and were buried in the deep. Others languished on wild and foreign coasts, lost to mystery and silence. The poem concludes by returning to its central enigma: no one knows what was said between the wind and the men it called, nor what answer was given in return. The wind blew a strange and new way for Nantucket men, and the old world called to New England across time and water, across generations, in whispers too subtle and too deep for ordinary language to capture. The poem as a whole is an elegy for a seafaring culture, a meditation on the unknowable forces — geographic, spiritual, economic, and romantic — that drew generations of New England men outward into the world and left their women and their homes filled with beautiful, foreign, and melancholy traces of those journeys. Babcock renders this history not through narrative or argument but through atmosphere, repetition, and image, giving the poem the quality of something half-remembered and half-dreamed, a whisper itself.
By Edwina Stanton Babcock · Genre: Poetry, Historical Fiction, Romanticism