Typically, ships at sea are invested with a sense of proliferation, of wandering out from one’s homeland into a wide, unknown, but exciting and explorable world to spread one’s roots elsewhere. However, in “Casabianca” the setting of a sinking ship at sea possesses the opposite connotation. The ship is invested with a sense of stagnation – the boy alone “stood on the burning deck” “And look’d from that lone post of death,” unable to graduate beyond his father’s orders to decide, independently, to escape for himself (1, 23). After all, “he would not go, / Without his father’s word” (9-10). Rather than resulting in the proliferation of the Casabianca family line, it abruptly cuts the family tree off. Both the boy and his father die on the sinking ship at sea, which destroys the potential of passing on their family name to future children...