How is the environment a central theme in the poem, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald?” What is the poem warning us as individuals?
Throughout the poem “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”, it seems obvious to us that the central theme of the poem is focused on the environment for most of the ballad. However, we feel there is a slight connection of loss as well. The environment’s loss then resulted in the loss of the men as an act of revenge. This ballad is about a ship sailing across the great Superior Lake carrying raw materials to a steel mill “With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more/ Concluding some with terms with a couple steel firms, when they left fully loaded for Cleveland,” (Lightfoot 5, 13-14) The Edmund Fitzgerald’s ill fated voyage took place in November, the wreck was a result of a storm with hurricane force winds. “And all that remains is the faces and the names of the wives and the sons and the daughters,” (Lightfoot 39 – 40). Those lines portrayed what occurred to those men and the ship itself once they met the rage of the storm, all twenty-nine men dead and the ship sunken. To us it seems that the environment was angry that they had taken so much of her resources, so angry she brewed up a fatal storm to destroy Edmund Fitzgerald. The men were taking away her precious materials, that was what the environment deemed its own fatal storm. The environment was angered that the men didn’t bother to even appreciate the Earth’s loss and so they would feel her wrath and experience loss as well. It warns us that if we aren’t careful and be cautious of all the resources we take to consume; the environment will hold a deadly grudge and make humans experience the loss she has felt. “Superior, they said, never gives up her dead,” (Lightfoot 55).
Word count: 300
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