In the Doldrums...

All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)

Growing up in New Orleans, I have some understanding of the expression "the doldrums."   While spending many summer days on Lake Pontchartrain in a friend's boat (a small Lafitte Skiff, see http://www.louisianafolklife.org/LT/Articles_Essays/creole_art_boatbuild_unfat.html), swiming, crabbing, etc., there was an occasional dead calm in parts of the lake, usually in the morning, the mirrored surface of the lake glistening, and the smell of the brackish water less inspiring.  No wind moved the gangs of hungry mosquitoes away.   We were at the mercy of the lake---until we fired up the boat's V6 inboard motor---which never left us stranded in the middle of the 630 square miles of water that is Lake Pontchartrain.   Had it failed, we would have floated aimlessly in the hot New Orleans summer.

      

Lafitte Skiff, south Louisiana, and Lake Pontchartrain, my boyhood playground was southeast of the Causeway Bridge (the line going 24 miles across the lake). New Orleans is on the south shore of the lake.

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;	5
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;	10
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

---"God's Grandeur," Gerard Manley Hopkins  (1844–89)