Sailor

A sailor, seaman, mariner, or seafarer is a person who works aboard a watercraft as part of its crew, and may work in any one of a number of different fields that are related to the operation and maintenance of a ship.

• Red sky at night, sailors' delight.
  Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.
  • Proverbial. Cf. Matthew 16:2b–3, and Venus and Adonis, 451–6

• In Tenedos I met by accident, two French Merchants of Marseills, intending for Constantinople, who had lost their ship at Sio, when they were busie at venereall tilting, with their new elected Mistresses, and for a second remedy, were glad to come thither in a Turkish Carmoesalo. The like of this I have seene fall out with Seafaring men, Merchants, and Passengers, who buy sometimes their too much folly, with too deare a repentance.
  • William Lithgow, Painefull Peregrinations (1640), Book III, 122

• I fear thee, ancyent Marinere!
    I fear thy skinny hand;
  And thou art long and lank and brown
    As is the ribb’d Sea-sand.
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere (1798), Part IV

• Where lies the land to which the ship would go?
  Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know.
  And where the land she travels from? Away,
  Far, far behind, is all that they can say.
  On sunny noons upon the deck’s smooth face,
  Link’d arm in arm, how pleasant here to pace;
  Or, o’er the stern reclining, watch below
  The foaming wake far widening as we go.
  On stormy nights when wild north-westers rave,
  How proud a thing to fight with wind and wave!
  The dripping sailor on the reeling mast
  Exults to bear, and scorns to wish it past.
  Where lies the land to which the ship would go?
  Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know.
  And where the land she travels from? Away,
  Far, far behind, is all that they can say.
  • Arthur Hugh Clough, [Untitled] (wr. 1852; pub. 1862)

• O well for the fisherman’s boy,
    That he shouts with his sister at play!
  O well for the sailor lad,
    That he sings in his boat on the bay!
  • Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Break, Break, Break" (wr. 1835; pub. 1842)

• A Shipman was ther, woning fer by weste:
  For aught I woot, he was of Dertemouthe.
  He rood up-on a rouncy, as he couthe,
  In a gowne of falding to the knee.
  A daggere hanging on a laas hadde he
  Aboute his nekke under his arm adoun.
  The hote somer had maad his hewe al broun;
  And, certeinly, he was a good felawe.
  Ful many a draughte of wyn had he y-drawe
  From Burdeux-ward, whyl that the chapman sleep.
  Of nyce conscience took he no keep.
  If that he faught, and hadde the hyer hond,
  By water he sente hem hoom to every lond.
  But of his craft to rekene wel his tydes,
  His stremes and his daungers him bisydes,
  His herberwe and his mone, his lodemenage,
  Ther nas noon swich from Hulle to Cartage.
  Hardy he was, and wys to undertake;
  With many a tempest hadde his berd been shake.
  He knew wel alle the havenes, as they were,
  From Gootlond to the cape of Finistere,
  And every cryke in Britayne and in Spayne;
  His barge y-cleped was the Maudelayne.
  • Geoffrey Chaucer, General Prologue, 388–410 (ed. Skeat)

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Sailor