The English warship Mary Rose sank in the Solent near Portsmouth while confronting a French invasion fleet in July 1545. Most of the hundreds of sailors and soldiers aboard died. Raised in 1982, the wreck later provided exceptional evidence about Tudor warfare, shipboard life and ordinary seamen.

The loss entered Tudor chronicles, songs and later historical poetry, while the recovered personal objects encouraged poets to imagine individual lives beneath official history. Modern poems about Mary Rose commonly contrast royal military ambition with the anonymous voices of drowned sailors.