I read the poem "Casabianca" to be a metaphorical "coming-of-age" tale that describes the changes the young boy faces as he enters adulthood. At the poem's start, the boy stands alone, surrounded by turmoil and without guidance. His father, once a powerful, anchoring figure, has now been lost below decks - this role model has lost the power it once had to give his life direction and stability. The ship itself symbolizes the boy's delusion that the young have some control of their own destiny; that it is possible to steer one's life with both hands on the conning station and full sheets to the wind. As the flames continue to consume this illusion of control, the boy refuses to abandon ship. Instead, he clings to this hopeless sentiment instead of realizing the truth - that he is not in control. The flames finally breech the magazines and the ship is violently and irreversibly destroyed, taking the boy with it. As his illusion of child-like innocence finally slips away, the boy is a boy no longer. He has been transformed by the flames into a man.
"But the noblest thing which perished there
was that young faithful heart!"
I interpret the flames as the threatening and unstoppable march of time that surrounds and entraps each of us. Time has the power to consume our "ship of life" and even we will eventually perish in this inferno. I am reminded of the recurring theme of time as fire in Delmore Schwartz's poem "Calmly We Walk through This April's Day", the last stanza reading:
Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
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