SOURCE: “The Language of the Sea: Relationships between the Language of Herman Melville and Sea Shanties of the Nineteenth Century,” in Southern Folklore Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 1, March, 1973, pp. 53-73.

In the following essay, Schwendinger studies the similarities between Melville's language and the language of nineteenth-century sea shanties—songs with a swinging, or lilting rhythm, often sung by sailors while onboard ship.

Over the years Herman Melville's language becomes the language of the sea as do sea shanties of the 19th Century, and similarities exist between both, in tone, symbols, figurative language, and subject matter. That Melville was concerned about the men who lived, worked and died upon the immutable sea, is readily evident,¹ and his poetic expression is a combination of fact and myth, two worlds of the great imagination, not unlike folk songs, themselves creative renderings of the forces from love through hate that play prophetic parts...