Section 7 Summary

Lines 127-130

The empty winds are creaking and the oak
Splatters and splatters on the cenotaph,
The boughs are trembling and a gaff
Bobs on the untimely stroke

• A "cenotaph" is an empty tomb. That, and the water imagery here place us back at the Nantucket cemetery, where the unmarked (and often empty) graves of drowned sailors overlook the sea.
• It's gotten a little… spookier, though. The winds are "empty" and the trees are creaking, while broken pieces of ship bob on the nearby waters. No longer is the speaker standing in a calm gravesite; it seems like this time the graveyard is in the aftermath of a storm, one that was pretty "untimely" for the poor sailors. 
• Even the branches ("boughs") are trembling; is something scary coming? Let's read on…

Lines 131-133

Of the greased wash exploding on a shoal-bell
In the old mouth of the Atlantic. It's well;
Atlantic, you are fouled with the blue sailors, 

• A "shoal-bell" is used to alert sailors of shallow waters. But the waters aren't shallow right now; the "greased wash" (the sea) is "exploding." 
• Hope you aren't eating, because we're about to gross you out. Ready? The sea water is "greased" because it's got lots of fish and whale guts in it. Ew.
• Why does the Atlantic have an "old mouth"? Could it be that the sea is kinda like God's mouth? We've certainly seen plenty of deity-imagery involving the sea, so it's possible.
• Whatever it is, the sea is filled with dead sailors (described as being "blue," which is a pretty literal way of saying "dead"). 
• It has so many dead sailors, in fact, that the speaker describes the water as "fouled" with them. Double yuck.

Lines 134-137

Sea-monsters, upward angel, downward fish:
Unmarried and corroding, spare of flesh
Mart once of supercilious, wing'd clippers,
Atlantic, where your bell-trap guts its spoil 

• This water has some sea-monsters, too, though the line is also an allusion to Milton's Paradise Lost, which features sea-monsters and demons in the water. Earlier, our speaker warned of the corruption the sea could let loose, and here it seems filled with that corruption. 
• Its waters are so corrupted, in fact, that they are "unmarried and corroding" society; they are eating away at the values of man. 
• It's like a market (what he calls "mart") too, where flesh is for sale (literally, fish flesh). Men sell the fruits of the sea in the market to make a profit, which the speaker is calling a corruption, too.
• And the "supercilious wing'd clippers" are fancy sailing ships that think they are superior to others. He's also commenting on the pride of man, which is another form of corruption. 
• The Atlantic, though, doesn't care about these fancy ships. It "guts" man, fish, and ship alike—the "spoils." The speaker uses the metaphor of what happens to a fish caught a fish trap ("bell-trap") to point to the way things get caught in the sea and then butchered.

Lines 138-141

You could cut the brackish winds with a knife
Here in Nantucket, and cast up the time
When the Lord God formed man from the sea's slime
And breathed into his face the breath of life, 

• The winds are thick and heavy enough to cut with a metaphorical knife. They're also "brackish" because they are near both salt and fresh water. The speaker imagines cutting through this wind and seeing inside it the beginning of human life, like it's some type of curtain.
• He calls mankind formed from the "slime" of the sea; if we are made from the sea, then those who drown in it are just going back to the place they were made. 
• Is he perhaps saying that, in the end, the sea is not our enemy, but our home? Let's keep going to find out.

Lines 142-143

And blue-lung'd combers lumbered to the kill.
The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.

• In the previous lines, we see man all new, but now here come the "blue-lung'd combers" to kill them. Who are these "combers"?
• They could be the waves, which are blue, which "comb" the beaches, and which certainly have killed a number of sailors in the poem. Or they could be the creatures of the sea, like the white whale, come to destroy man. They could also be the dead sailors themselves, repeating the violence they once wrought upon the sea (through war and whaling). Whatever they are, they represent the violence of the sea, and man's inability to tame it.
• Then, with his final line, Lowell's speaker reminds us of the story of the Great Flood in the Bible, where God decided to flood the entire earth to rid it of man's wickedness. After the flood, he made a rainbow appear in the sky, as a promise to the survivors that he wouldn't flood the earth again.
• So why remind the reader of this promise, when we've just read a 143-line poem about people drowning at sea? Perhaps it is because these sailors chose to battle the waters, thinking they could survive, but it's "God's will" who lives or dies in the end. God and the sea are bigger than man ("the Lord survives"), something the rainbow is there to make sure we don't forget.