text: Great War at Sea Poetry Project Update – and World War 2 poetry – World War Poetry
  Posted on 20th September 2015 22nd February 2017 by Michael Bully
  After some deliberation it's been decided to move the goal posts a little . The Great War at Sea Poetry Project website at greatwaratseapoetry will keep to its original remit. This blog will also cover World War 2 sea poetry as there is some magnificent work out there which gets overlooked by emphasis on World War 1 poetry.
  ARCTIC CONVOY. ON BOARD HMS INGLEFIELD, 14 FEBRUARY TO 13 MARCH 1943, DURING CONVOY DUTIES IN ARCTIC WATERS. (A 15414) The convoy on the horizon as seen from HMS INGLEFIELD. Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205148486
  Alan Ross -'Survivors'
  Where daybreak died in the smile –
  Yet somehow were able to find their way –
  Ross' work depicts war realistically, reporting what simply is. Never sentimental, but neither does he try to argue against the war taking place. In fact in a booklet titled 'Open Sea' published in 1975, he wrote
  "I can think of no one I served with, who resented the reasons for the war against Nazi Germany, however intolerable they have found the reality.
  What I recall from those years is often resenting the sea as much as the Germans."
  Great War at Sea Poetry is sometimes accused of being quite static. There can be triumphalism, evident in poets such as Hopwood and 'Klaxon', the sense of loss that appears in Kipling's 'My Boy Jack', the solitude evoked by Edward Hilton Young, Paul Bewsher, Miles Jeffrey Game Day, the poetic imagination gradually coming to terms with new war technology such as Editha Jenkinson or Henry Head writing about minesweepers or destroyers. It's hard to find examples of Great War at Sea Poetry evoking the heat of battle at sea.
  Alan Ross wrote one epic poem about his experiences ' J.W.51.B- A convoy', which is an incredible depiction of sea warfare that took place at the Battle of the Barents Sea on 31st December 1942. The opening line is startling
  'Hammocks swinging as the sea swings,
  Of dream in the lamp's shadowing rings.
  Some dreams are for ever. '
  " Hipper and Onslow, sea-horses
  Round them, camouflaging. "
  Fiction more than poetry had supplied more emphasis on the Arctic Convoys providing the setting for Alistair Maclean's first novel 'HMS Ulysses', first published in 1955, and based on the writer's own naval service. Nicholas Monsarrat's seminal novel, 'The Cruel Sea' (1951), though largely about the World War 2 Atlantic convoys, features one Arctic Convoy voyage, which was left out of the 1953 film.