History Heritage & Cultural Traditions

Ocean Cultures

Year-End Reading: At the Fishhouses

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At The Fishhouses

by Elizabeth Bishop
Excerpt from "At the Fishhouses" from "The Complete Poems 1927-1979" by Elizabeth Bishop. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: Noonday, 1994.

Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,

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Christmas at Sea

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Christmas at Sea
An evocative seasonal poem by Robert Louis Stevenson published in 1888, five years after his beloved novel, Treasure Island, was published. Christmas at Sea appears in an anthology of poems compiled by the Radio4 program Poetry Please: The Nation’s Best-Loved Poems, with a forward by Roger McGough, published in 2014 by Faber & Faber Books. Christmas at Sea is in the public domain.

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Pope Francis and the Ocean, Revisited

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About World Ocean Radio
World Ocean Radio is a weekly series of five-minute audio essays available for syndicated use at no cost by college and community radio stations worldwide. Peter Neill, Director of the World Ocean Observatory and host of World Ocean Radio, provides coverage of a broad spectrum of ocean issues from science and education to advocacy and exemplary projects.

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At the Fishhouses, 2024

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At the Fishhouses is among our favorite poems, and is a clear winner for the season. We hope it is for you, too, whether you are revisiting a reading or are hearing it for the first time. It speaks to all of us that dwell at the water's edge, in a physical space or merely in the mind.

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals . . .

Happy New Year from World Ocean Radio and World Ocean Observatory.

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Looking East from West

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About World Ocean Radio

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