If The White Ship is an interesting tale, it's solely due to the quality of its imagery.The White Ship
Our Rating:
Good
Howard Phillips Lovecraft is the father of cosmic horror – the genre constructed around the notion that we humans are just a tiny, insignificant part of the universe, which holds much bigger, ancient, more powerful beings. We are nothing compared to what lies out there, beyond our reach and understanding.
The plan is to write a few paragraphs – a small review – on each of H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories and novellas, following a chronological order – as they are structured in the Barnes & Noble edition of H.P. Lovecraft The Complete Fiction. The point is to analyze how Lovecraft crafted his tales of horror, the narrative devices he used, the patterns in his writing, the common themes present in his work, and – of course – the blatant racism that permeates some of his stories.
There will be spoilers, of course.
—> You can read or listen to the short story for free here.
The White Ship
The White Ship is all about description and imagery. It tells the story of a lonely man who boards a magic ship to travel to the most incredible places, but it focuses solely on the strange qualities of these locations in order to produce a sense of wonder and awe.
The narrator in The White Ship is in love with the sea. He considers it a powerful, wondrous entity that holds many mysteries. After being alone in a lighthouse for far too long (“I thought I were the last man on the planet,” he confesses in the first paragraph), the protagonist starts to see things in the water, having powerful visions when he stares at the waves crashing on the shore.
The narrator frequently talks about the sea as if it were a living, breathing, sentient being, capable of dreaming and speaking of old memories. He listens to the sea with reverence and respect, believing that it has knowledge about the past, the present, and the future. He claims that by looking at the water he can experience glimpses “of the ways that were and the ways that might be, as of the ways that are; for the ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and dreams of Time.”
Sometimes, he spots a white ship sailing in the distance – a ship that always manages to move with grace no matter how fierce the waves and the wind are. This ship is linked to a sense of serenity: it sails silently, glides smoothly, and moves rhythmically; its captain speaks with a soft language, beckoning the narrator to come aboard, while the oarsmen sing sweet songs under the full moon.
One night, the protagonist accepts the invitation to board this strange ship, getting to it by walking over “a bridge of moonbeams,” which immediately cements the fantastical, dreamlike tone of the narrative.
He then begins to speak of the wondrous places he visited. First is Zar, the Land of Dreams, where there were “visions of young poets who died in want before the world could learn of what they had seen and dreamed,” signaling that the sea knows not only what there was, is, and will be, but also what could have been.
Next is Thalarion, the City of Mysteries, which is described in ambivalent terms to fit its theme: it’s “fascinating yet repellent,” it’s “alluring” but also “weird and ominous.” The city is a trap; a place that lures people with its questions but offers no answers – even the spires of its temples reach beyond the horizon just “so that no man might behold their peaks.”
Not all places are welcoming, after all. There’s also one that enchants the protagonist with its colors and music, but when he gets near it, the wind brings the foul scent of disease and death. The captain explains, “This is Xura, the Land of Pleasures Unnatained.”
Finally, he arrives at the Land of Fancy, where he stayed happily for countless eons, for it was a place free of suffering and death, as time and space didn’t dwell there.
Eventually, however, the narrator hears about a city of gold in the west, called Cathuria, and becomes enchanted with its image: “Of marble and porphyry are the houses, and roofed with glittering gold that reflects the rays of the sun and enhances the splendour of the cities, as blissful gods view them from the distant peaks.”
The captain warns him about the city, claiming that no one has ever seen it, but the protagonist doesn’t heed the warning and sets sail anyway to find his El Dorado. El Dorado indeed, as his search for this city of gold in the unexplored west ends up leading him only to death and ruin. He finds no city; he finds no gold. The white ship reaches the edge of the world instead and falls to its destruction.
The protagonist wakes up in his lighthouse, alive and well, but cut off from the magic world forever, as the sea never spoke with him again.
This ending functions as a cautionary tale. The narrator tried to bite more than he could chew, he reached too far, trying to get, see, and experience everything the boundless universe had to offer, but just lost all that he had in the process. The universe closed itself to him, denying him even a tiny piece of its magic.
If The White Ship is an interesting tale, it’s solely due to the quality of its imagery. The protagonist has no personality whatsoever – we don’t even fully get why he would leave the Land of Fancy to search for a golden city – but the descriptions are certainly fascinating, capturing the wondrous qualities of those fantastical places.
March 14, 2025.
