Out of All the Masts

"Out of All the Masts" (also rendered as "From the Multitude of Masts", "Of the Masts" or "Of All the Ships"; Romanian: Dintre sute de catarge, literally "Of the Hundreds of Masts") is an 1880 philosophical poem by Mihai Eminescu, Romania's national poet. Written in a condensed, four-stanza format, with a very tight rhyming sequence which makes it notoriously hard to translate, it is widely seen as a small masterpiece in Romanian literature. Its central metaphor, of sailing ships and migratory birds heading out into a naturally perilous journey, constitutes a reflection on entropy, which, over the last lines, builds up into a summary of ontological idealism; Eminescu urges his readers to identify entropy as a guiding law of existence, and to recognize their own thoughts as imperfect echoes from a superior level of reality. The kenning of "winds" and "waves" as stand-ins for generic fate is presumed to originate with similar usage in Romanian folklore, using "time" instead of "waves". Eminescu's reliance on maritime imagery, which was largely absent from Romanian poetry up to that point, may be an indirect record of his trips to Northern Dobruja in the late 1870s.

Eminescu allowed a selection of his poems to be published during his lifetime, but it did not include "Out of All the Masts"—which, in the handwritten version, had no exact title. He preserved the poem, as well as two early versions of it, in his private notebooks, which exegetes discovered and named after his death. The piece was first printed in 1902, and received with enthusiasm by Eminescu's disciple, Alexandru Vlahuță, by their former rival Alexandru Macedonski, as well as by literary critic Garabet Ibrăileanu; the latter fought to make it a standard of all Eminescu editions. The title and metaphor were revived in Communist Romania and Soviet Moldavia as a literary reference to aspiring youth. Its more or less faithful translations into international languages gave it a world fame; "Out of All the Masts" was pastiched by authors such as Alexandru Toma, Stella Leonardos, and Ion Hadârcă.