“And the ports have names for the sea”

W.H. Auden describes somewhere how he had written a line, in a poem about Iceland,

and the poets have names for the sea

and the printer set it up in galley as

and the ports have names for the sea.

Auden left it, liking the line better, again I think for its emotional change. Yeats said that young poets nowadays didn’t trust enough to luck. He may have had such happy accidents in mind.

—Patric Dickinson, “Shakespeare Considered as a Poet”