The Singer Of The Sea

Ina Coolbrith (1841-1928), the Overland Monthly poet who in 1915 became California’s first poet laureate and the first state laureate in the United States, wrote The Singer of the Sea (1894) in memory of Celia Thaxter, the New England poet of the Isles of Shoals who died that year. The Century Club of California issued the elegy as a small commemorative chapbook. The pairing of the two women was fitting: Thaxter stood to the Atlantic Monthly much as Coolbrith stood to the Overland, each magazine’s resident voice of its own coastline. Coolbrith herself anchored San Francisco’s early literary circle alongside Bret Harte and Charles Warren Stoddard, and as an Oakland librarian she guided the young Jack London. This short poem shows the elegiac side of her sea-haunted verse. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.