By The Sea by Christina Rossetti - a powerful way into understanding

By The Sea by Christina Rossetti
This resource offers a way to come to understand this great poem by using creative imagination.
Read the poem through to your students a couple of times then ask them to imagine something. They are the captain of a ship moored in a deep harbour quite close to the shore and nearby is a wide river estuary. It is dusk and rapidly becoming night.
Write out a captain’s log, which uses the information in stanza one to describe the scene and the feelings of the captain. Try to use quotes from stanza one and feel free to bring in extracts from other great poems to illustrate thoughts and ideas.
Then ask them to imagine they are a diver who goes down and explores the sea-bed. Again use ideas and, if possible, quotes from stanza two and three to bring the descriptions alive.
The next step is to read out the captains’ logs and then read the poem out loud again and see if the creative writing exercise throws light and understanding and importantly, appreciation, onto the poem itself.
An example from stanza one is provided and all the direct quotes from the Rossetti poem are underlined for ease of reference.