Life & Wisdom Quote by Fanny Crosby

A question like this isn’t really fishing for an answer; it’s setting a trap for human certainty. “Can ye fathom” uses the old nautical measure as a moral challenge: you can drop a line, take a reading, pretend mastery, but the ocean remains “dark and deep” - not just physically vast, but insistently unknowable. Crosby’s diction leans biblical (“ye”), which matters. It frames the sea as creation, not scenery, and turns awe into an argument about limits: your mind can map coastlines, not the abyss.

The subtext is devotional without needing to name God. “Mighty waves” suggests force that cannot be negotiated with; “grandeur” suggests beauty that can’t be owned. Put together, the ocean becomes a stand-in for the kinds of realities Crosby spent her career circling: faith, providence, suffering, mystery. The line’s music - the paired beats of “dark and deep,” the sweep of “mighty” into “grandeur” - performs what it describes, a rhythmic surge that carries you past analysis into feeling.

Context sharpens it. Crosby, a blind poet best known for hymn texts, often wrote from inside the tension between constraint and immensity: limited sight, expansive inner vision; personal vulnerability, cosmic scale. Here, the sea functions like her theology at its most persuasive: not proof, but pressure. The question doesn’t belittle the reader; it invites humility as a form of clarity.