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.

Quotes

• 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)