Few objects elicit more laughter and resentment than luxury ships. In context of Arab politics during the two World Wars, the spectacle of the yacht at sea invited nationalist poetry, although the vessel itself was monarchical by design. My paper considers the poetic moments heralding royal ships, from the Shatt al-Arab waterway to Suez. I analyze the legacy of Ottoman- and Mandate-era performances, many of whose poems were not published until post-monarchy decades, in constitutional republics. As governments were nationalizing or selling off their fallen kings’ luxury items, they were also canonizing poetry praising those rulers as naval geniuses. I find that the obsequious tendencies of neoclassical Arabic madih (panegyric) help us to understand the enduring attraction of yacht aesthetics in popular culture. Taking a wide view of global shifts toward populism, I ask what insights nautical poems can give us on the icon of the yacht itself. The 21st century fetishizes royal pageantry and peak-capitalist “Yacht Rock,” even while economic populists currently target yacht owners as a class to be toppled. I argue that waves of nostalgia inform each other, even across regions and epochs. The paper concludes by considering the publication history of its Arabic sources, disseminated by national ministries and Arabic semi-private digital enterprises. We see now editors’ rising interest in examining historical Arab seascapes from a distinctly royal, naval perspective—even in cases in which the royal governing system is a relic of the distant past. My paper ultimately seeks to understand how yachts become literary spaces in the process of sparking extraordinary, and productive, public outrage.