With George Barker (1913–1991), as with any prolific poet, you have to make your way through an awful lot of not-so-good work to get to the real gold. I think On a Friend’s Escape from Drowning off the Norfolk Coast is one of his good ones. It is a forceful and dramatic depiction of an incident that could have become a tragedy. Perhaps it also appeals to me because I know that part of the Norfolk coast and its cold grey treacherous sea.
The phrase “the running grave” in the first line appeared in an earlier poem by Dylan Thomas. George Barker re-used it for his own poem.
Robert Galbraith/J K Rowling used it as the title of the seventh Cormoran Strike novel, in which one of the characters tries to pass off the George Barker poem as his own work. Is that a comment on literary plagiarism? Perhaps, but Dylan Thomas used it to refer to time, whereas Barker has it describing the sea. A drowning on Cromer beach is central to the novel’s plot, so I think Galbraith/Rowling had Barker’s poem in mind.
On a Friend’s Escape from Drowning off the Norfolk Coast by George Barker
Came up that cold sea at Cromer like a running grave
Beside him as he struck
Wildly towards the shore, but the blackcapped wave
Crossed him and swung him back,
And he saw his son digging in the castled dirt that could save.
Then the farewell rock
Rose a last time to his eyes. As he cried out
A pawing gag of the sea
Smothered his cry and he sank in his own shout
Like a dying airman. Then she
Deep near her son asleep on the hourglass sand
Was awakened by whom
Save the Fate who knew that this was the wrong time:
And opened her eyes
On the death of her son’s begetter. Up she flies
Into the hydra-headed
Grave as he closes his life upon her who for
Life has so richly bedded him.
But she drove through his drowning like Orpheus and tore
Back by his hair
Her escaping bridegroom. And on the sand their son
Stood laughing where
He was almost an orphan. Then the three lay down
On that cold sand
Each holding the other by a living hand.
The Good Reader 