One of the things that struck me about the show, after seeing it, was Homer's use of narrative and illustration techniques in his earlier paintings - they tell specific stories, events, people, and ships appear in them, and buildings, and other details of human involvement in the natural scene - and how these narrative elements gradually drop away in his later work until we are left with raw nature, and we, the viewers, have ourselves become the observers he used to paint on canvas. There is no story left, other than the same old glorious one, told over and over by the ocean. Homer reminds me of another American Master - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as he grew older, with no need to repeat the epic poems of his past, instead writing some gems of poems that include everything we need, short as they are. Here is one such, that I love, on this same theme, written by Longfellow late in life. I think of this often, when I'm out painting by the ocean myself:
The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls
The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
The traveller hastens toward the town,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.
Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls;
The little waves, with their soft, white hands,
Efface the footprints in the sands,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.
The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls
Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;
The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveller to the shore,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.