Casabianca Images

List of Images:
A burning ship
A boy standing on a burning deck
His father dead
The boy desperately calling for his father’s orders

In Felicia Hermans poem, Casabianca, the reader is immersed in a powerful, chaotic scene where flames lick every crevice of a burning ship while a boy, faithful to his father, stands bravely on its deck. With each stanza, the boy’s death is made more inevitable. The reader is frequently reminded of the fire that grew with time. However, he is adamant to follow his father’s orders to stay on the ship. He calls three times for his father before the flames overcome the vessel and destroy it completely. At that point, only “the winds that far around” know what has become of him.
Hermans uses effective, visual imagery to depict the boy and his hapless situation. The most effective image created by the poem is that of the boy calling out while flames rage around him. He looks “in still, yet brave despair” for his father’s impossible response, unaware that his predecessor was dead. He is not devoid of fear. His words contain certain urgency. However, because he is too petrified to move or too loyal to stray (or perhaps both), he stays where he is and, with the ship, succumbs to the flames.
This image best captures the essence of Casabianca because, while death is a common motif, as expected of a poem of war, its existence or certainty does not seem to be the point that Hermans is trying to convey. Instead, the ballad is more about the boy’s bravery rather than his demise. He is described as “a creature of heroic blood”, someone “born to rule the storm”; and at the end of the poem, the reader is made not to dwindle on the boy’s death and is concluded with “the noblest thing that perished there was that young, faithful heart”. In his passing, he is immortalized.