Since I was a boy, poetry for me has been almost as much an audible experience as an interior one. My mother read poems out loud to me and my brother Greg almost every day when we came home from school in our early years. She would read us the classics she loved—Browning, Tennyson, Poe, Blake, Housman and more. My father had a marvelous memory for poems; we heard reams of his favorite passages at the family dinner table. We had some vinyl recordings of nursery rhymes, of course, but also albums of Carl Sandburg, Shakespeare, the Bible. Poetry wasn’t musty and dusty in our house; it was alive in our mouths and ringing in our ears.

All of that sounds very strange now, I suppose; highfalutin or snobby. But it really wasn’t back in the years my parents were raising their ten children, from the late 1940s until the late 1970s . Poetry was, for many lower- or middle-class city kids like them who were able to get a college education (many through the GI Bill), an essential accompaniment and signal of the upward mobility that defined their lives. They were American strivers, my parents, like most of the men and women of that generation whom we call “greatest,” in part precisely because of that aspect of their character.

After I left home, I kept up the habit of trying poems out loud. Still do, though less frequently and more soberly. I lived in the west of Ireland for a year after college, and there were not a few nights after the pub closed when I would carry myself and the pints and quarts of stout that were in me back up Lower Salthill Road to my bedsit apartment, which would not stop reeling around my head like a Tilt-A-Whirl, making the accurate placement of my posterior on the one chair I owned very difficult. The bed was out of the question. So I’d plop myself on the floor by my pile of books, light a cigarette, and pull a volume of poems out for declamation. For some reason (unrecoverable now, gone I suppose with the brain cells lost that year), it was often Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Sober, I had no idea what in the name of God Ezra Pound was talking about in that modernist classic. Drunk, it made even less sense. But how it sounded when bellowed and slurred mightily into the night! Nasty man, Pound. But good company when the room is spinning.

There’s a power in your voice. Not the voice in your head, the one that speaks your interior monologue; your physical voice, the one the rest of us hear. The spoken word is a commitment, a confirmation, an exercise of your spiritual strength. When we speak up, we declare ourselves to each other in a way that carries, more than any other means of communication, deep social energies. Remember the first time you said “I love you” to someone? How charged those three words were, how much risk and consequence and death-defying hope they sent into the world, simply because they were put by your voice (or by your signing hands) physically into the space between you and the person to whom you said them. To a greater or lesser degree, all our spoken words accomplish some version of that transfiguration.

There was a meme going around TikTok for a while (perhaps it’s still in circulation): “Say the weird thing.” A creator named Andi Marie Tillman started it last year, encouraging people to break through the dullness of ordinary chitchat and get real, or just weird. Out loud. Lots of people took her up on the suggestion, stitching their weirdnesses, real or invented, to her invitation. It’s an amusing trend, even (especially) because at times people get gross and/or disturbing. It’s a little risky, for the performers and for us, the hearers. Andi’s accomplishment, in her deep, drawling Appalachian invitation to people on TikTok, was to get us to claim the power of saying something out loud—for fun. She understood that magic.

On X/Twitter, something analogous is accomplished when people post one of the most famous American representations of the power of the spoken word, Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom of Speech,” and offer an opinion they know might be controversial:

Rockwell’s beautiful painting captures what we hope our country can be: a nation where every voice is heard, every voice counts, because deep down everyone knows what that man is going through inside himself as he rises to speak his opinion—and because people are actually listening to him. Rockwell crystalizes the American political ideal. It is a bitter and biting irony that his soaring idealism has become a meme on the algorithmically debased, right-wing, corporate platform of Elon Musk’s X.

Never has our country needed our public voices more than now. People increasingly understand this. More and more Americans are rising up and speaking up at town halls, at protests large and small, at local government meetings, out on the streets where masked ICE agents are brutalizing migrants, on their social media accounts, even with their neighbors who do not share their beliefs. There is a power in your voice. Use it.

Reading poetry out loud is a great way to limber up, to feel that power in your voice and have some fun with it, get used to how it sounds and strengthen it. And that’s what this week’s poem is all about.

It’s called “Sea Fever,” and it’s by John Masefield, once the Poet Laureate of England, now mostly forgotten. It’s a rollicking, onomatopoeic piece that bursts with vocal energies, the rhythm and run of it putting you right on board, a fresh wind filling your sails and the boat heeling over—what then-President-elect John F. Kennedy must have felt in the moment captured in the splendid photo from the December 26, 1960, issue of Sports Illustrated. JFK quoted Masefield from time to time; Jackie, too, after her husband was killed. So there’s a connection—but, really, he just looks so great in that photo.

One note: the word “trick” in the last line means a sailor’s turn at the helm or other duty on board.

I recited this poem when I was in fourth grade, and have loved it ever since. Give it a try!

by John Masefield

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I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;

And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,

And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide

Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;

And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,

And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,

To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;

And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,

And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.