Spouting Poetry into the wind
John Masefield
Poetry is becoming increasingly unfashionable these days. especially poetry that scans…or heaven forbid, rhymes.
With so many more immediate forms of mental gratification, (save me from Wordle) the idea of picking your way through a labyrinth of challenging ideas, arranged to create sounds that add meaning to the central concept, is perhaps a big ask.
But here at SWS we’d like to embrace the unfashionable. This is the first in an occasional series on maritime verse. I’m hoping that some of you might be tempted to reach deep into your libraries and send in a poem that fits, however loosely, the SWS ethos, and perhaps a few comments on what it means to you.
Cargoes
Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.
Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amythysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.
Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.
John Masefield
Most people when asked to name a “Maritime” poem would probably name “Sea Fever” by John Masefield in their initial list of five.. I subconsciously revert to Spike Miligan’s version, every time I hear it.
("I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky; / I left my shoes and socks there - I wonder if they're dry?"). It still brings a smile to my face.
However Masefield’s other great seafaring poem the 1903 “Cargoes” for me, is more powerful.
"Cargoes" remains a great modernist lyric precisely because of its negotiation between high archaic diction and low new objects. It begins with a mental picture which for most readers will be hazy at best (quinquereme: an ancient galley-ship with five files of oarsmen on each side) which is effectively secondary to the glamour of the sound. By the last stanza, however, the language has drawn closer to its object, as the same headlong rhythm draws ancient and modern into a poetic continuum.
Masefield's "cheap" is not snobbish but pleased, evoking an egalitarian sufficiency of such goods across England (the list runs neatly northeast to southwest, from Tyne coal to Cornish tin). The poem digests and expresses new objects, and with them something like a new feeling: that industrialised society may be grimy and merciless - as the Victorian poets often felt - but that at the same time its endless activities and productions are inherently exciting to the imagination. The verbal image that "Cargoes" makes to express this feeling endures beyond its period.
From The Guardian 2005