Tag: Poetry

Messmates by Henry Newbolt

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Henry Newbolt’s naval poems of the late nineteenth century often tend to be rousing ballads that celebrate Britain’s naval history. They tell tales of great admirals and famous battles of the past. Messmates is a bit different though, closer to Kipling perhaps in its concentration on the ordinary seaman and rather sadder in tone.

A word about the maritime language used here. “Watch” is roughly equivalent to “shift”, the division of time on board ship. But it also means the team to which a sailor is allocated, so keeping a “lone watch” emphasises the isolation of the man who has died and been buried at sea. And on a sailing ship, the mess was the area in which a group of men lived, ate and slept, so a messmate was a member of a close-knit team.

The page layout and spacing is Newbolt’s own and I have taken it directly from Collected Poems 1897–1907.

Messmates by Henry Newbolt

He gave us all a good-bye cheerily
   At the first dawn of day;
We dropped him down the side full
      drearily
When the light died away.
It’s a dead dark watch that he’s
      a-keeping there,
And a long, long night that lags
      a-creeping there,
Where the Trades and the tides roll
      over him
   And the great ships go by.

He’s there alone with green seas
      rocking him
   For a thousand miles round;
He’s there alone with dumb things
      mocking him,
And we’re homeward bound.
It’s a long, lone watch that he’s
      a-keeping there,
And a dead cold night that lags
      a-creeping there
While the months and the years
      roll over him
   And the great ships go by.

I wonder if the tramps come near
      enough
   As they thrash to and fro,
And the battle-ships’ bells ring clear
      enough
   To be heard down below;
If through all the lone watch that
      he’s a-keeping there,
And the long, cold night that lags
      a-creeping there,
The voices of the sailor-men shall
      comfort him
   When the great ships go by.

The Old Year by John Clare

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This one speaks for itself, really. I was looking for a poem for the New Year. I felt that I couldn’t use Tennyson’s Ring Out, Wild Bells again, so I had a look and found The Old Year by John Clare (1793–1864).

John Clare is probably best known today for two things. The first of these is that he had some kind of mental breakdown that led to him spending the later part of his life in what was then known as an asylum. It was during this time that he wrote his well-known poem I Am.

The second is that in 1841 he absconded from the asylum in Essex and walked the eighty miles back to his home at Northborough in North Cambridgeshire. It took him four days.

In the poem below, I assume that the word “cot” in the second verse is short for “cottage”. The “time once torn away” line makes me wonder if Philip Larkin was inspired by this poem for the line “time torn off unused” in his poem Aubade.

The Old Year by John Clare

The Old Year’s gone away
     To nothingness and night:
We cannot find him all the day
     Nor hear him in the night:
He left no footstep, mark or place
     In either shade or sun:
The last year he’d a neighbour’s face,
     In this he’s known by none.

All nothing everywhere:
     Mists we on mornings see
Have more of substance when they’re here
     And more of form than he.
He was a friend by every fire,
     In every cot and hall–
A guest to every heart’s desire,
     And now he’s nought at all.

Old papers thrown away,
     Old garments cast aside,
The talk of yesterday,
     Are things identified;
But time once torn away
     No voices can recall:
The eve of New Year’s Day
     Left the Old Year lost to all.

    

The Way Through the Woods by Rudyard Kipling

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I’m lucky enough to live within ten minutes’ walk of some woods that I’ve known since I was a boy. It’s been a life saver to be able to go there during the lockdown. The place has been transformed, with no planes overhead and much less traffic noise.

Everything smells fresh and the birds all sing at the same time so it’s hard to tell the calls apart. Today we went a little further off the beaten track and surprised a bird in a hole in a tree trunk.

So many trees have grown up since I first knew the place. It’s a nature reserve now and allowed to run wild. It’s hard to pick out the features I knew so long ago and the paths seem to lead in different directions from how I remember them. I found the sunken field with a concrete retaining wall, where they used to race bicycles. It’s completely overgrown now.

As I wander the paths, trying to orientate myself, the opening words of Kipling’s poem come into my mind.

 

The Way Through the Woods

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods.
But there is no road through the woods.