Arthur Stringer (1874–1950) was a Canadian novelist, poet, and screenwriter whose career moved between popular fiction, journalism, and lyric poetry. In the early twentieth century, when ocean travel and industrialization were reshaping daily life, Stringer often returned to older romantic images of the sea and the soul. "The Meaning" grows out of that tension. It uses the sea as a familiar symbol, then turns away from the sea itself to celebrate the human energy that gives the sea its significance.
The poem is built on three parallel negations. It is not the sea, the flesh, or the earth that the speaker loves, but the ships, the spirit, and the mortals who animate them. Ships must "dare and endure and defy and survive" the sea; spirit "guides and derides and controls and outlives" the flesh; mortals give the earth "meaning and colour and passion and life." The central idea is that physical matter is incomplete on its own. Meaning arrives through risk, consciousness, and love—through what human beings and their souls actively bring to the world. The speaker does not stand back to admire nature as a picture; he values the struggle, the inner force, and the affection that transform it.
The construction reinforces that argument. Stringer repeats "It isn’t…" at the start of each movement, creating a rhythm of refusal and affirmation. Each stanza begins with a large physical noun—sea, flesh, earth—and then shifts to a more active presence: ships, spirit, mortals. The line lengths rise and fall like a swell, with a short noun line at the center of each movement. That motion is intensified by expanding chains of verbs. The four-part phrases feel like drumbeats or the churn of engines: "dare and endure and defy and survive." Assonance and alliteration bind each chain together, while the repeated "and" drives the lines forward. There is almost no end rhyme, yet the music comes from parallelism and inversion. The final three questions reverse the pattern, asking readers to imagine absence: "For what is the Sea without ships? / And what is the flesh without soul? / And what is a world without love?"
The imagery moves outward in stages. The sea and ships suggest courage and survival; the flesh and spirit turn inward toward the soul that outlives the body; the earth and mortals expand to the whole human world. This progression implies that the same principle operates at every scale: value depends on an animating force. The word "love" opens and closes the poem, framing it as a personal declaration of values. It is love of effort, spirit, and connection, not of surfaces or objects.
What makes "The Meaning" significant is its compact, memorable blending of humanist and spiritual conviction. Stringer does not dismiss the sea or the earth; he insists that their grandeur is incomplete without ships, soul, and love. The poem also shows how repetition, rhythm, and reversal can build an argument while keeping emotional warmth. Its quiet radicalism lies in the claim that meaning is not found in things but created by what we dare, endure, and give.