Archives: Poems

1
We have no heart for the fishing, we have no hand for the oar —
All that our fathers taught us of old pleases us now no more;
All that our own hearts bid us believe we doubt where we do not deny —
There is no proof in the bread we eat or rest in the toil we ply.  
2
Look you, our foreshore stretches far through sea-gate, dyke, and groin — 
Made land all, that our fathers made, where the flats and the fairway join. 
They forced the sea a sea-league back. They died, and their work stood fast.
We were born to peace in the lee of the dykes, but the time of our peace is past.  
3
Far off, the full tide clambers and slips, mouthing and testing all,
Nipping the flanks of the water-gates, baying along the wall;
Turning the shingle, returning the shingle, changing the set of the sand...
We are too far from the beach, men say, to know how the outworks stand. 
4
So we come down, uneasy, to look, uneasily pacing the beach.
These are the dykes our fathers made: we have never known a breach.
Time and again has the gale blown by and we were not afraid;
Now we come only to look at the dykes — at the dykes our fathers made.  
5
O’er the marsh where the homesteads cower apart the harried sunlight flies,
Shifts and considers, wanes and recovers, scatters and sickens and dies — 
An evil ember bedded in ash — a spark blown west by the wind... 
We are surrendered to night and the sea — the gale and the tide behind!  
6
At the bridge of the lower saltings the cattle gather and blare,
Roused by the feet of running men, dazed by the lantern glare.
Unbar and let them away for their lives—the levels drown as they stand,
Where the flood-wash forces the sluices aback and the ditches deliver inland.  
7
Ninefold deep to the top of the dykes the galloping breakers stride,
And their overcarried spray is a sea — a sea on the landward side.
Coming, like stallions they paw with their hooves, going they snatch with their teeth,
Till the bents and the furze and the sand are dragged out, and the old-time hurdles beneath.  
8
Bid men gather fuel for fire, the tar, the oil and the tow — 
Flame we shall need, not smoke, in the dark if the riddled seabanks go.
Bid the ringers watch in the tower (who knows how the dawn shall prove?)
Each with his rope between his feet and the trembling bells above.  
9
Now we can only wait till the day, wait and apportion our shame.
These are the dykes our fathers left, but we would not look to the same.
Time and again were we warned of the dykes, time and again we delayed:
Now, it may fall, we have slain our sons, as our fathers we have betrayed.  
10
Walking along the wreck of the dykes, watching the work of the seas!
These were the dykes our fathers made to our great profit and ease.
But the peace is gone and the profit is gone, with the old sure days withdrawn... 
That our own houses show as strange when we come back in the dawn!

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If wars were won by feasting,
   Or victory by song,
Or safety found in sleeping sound,
   How England would be strong!
But honour and dominion 
   Are not maintained so. 
They're only got by sword and shot, 
   And this the Dutchmen know! 

The moneys that should feed us 
   You spend on your delight, 
How can you then have sailor-men 
   To aid you in your fight? 
Our fish and cheese are rotten, 
   Which makes the scurvy grow– 
We cannot serve you if we starve,
   And this the Dutchmen know! 

Our ships in every harbour
   Be neither whole nor sound,
And, when we seek to mend a leak,
   No oakum can be found;
Or, if it is, the caulkers,
   And carpenters also,
For lack of pay have gone away,
   And this the Dutchmen know! 

Mere powder, guns, and bullets, 
   We scarce can get at all; 
Their price was spent in merriment 
   And revel at Whitehall, 
While we in tattered doublets 
   From ship to ship must row, 
Beseeching friends for odds and ends– 
   And this the Dutchmen know!  

No King will heed our warnings, 
   No Court will pay our claims– 
Our King and Court for their disport 
   Do sell the very Thames! 
For, now De Ruyter's topsails
   Off naked Chatham show, 
We dare not meet him with our fleet–
   And this the Dutchmen know!

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You would fain see a return to the 'golden days of song' when it was
fashionable to sing of Annie Laurie. So far as my poor memory serves
me, that young lady's face was 'the fairest That ever sun shone on'.
I  put it to you, as a husband, as a father, as a bachelor—conceive the
positive inhumanity, in this weather, of suggesting the possibility of
sunshine upon any face that you took an interest in. The brow 'like the
snowdrift', the 'neck like the swan' and the devotion that depends on
these, where would they be after ten minutes exposure? Burnt up,
Sir, burnt up—freckled, tanned, blistered, destroyed. No, if we must
sing 'Annie Laurie' in the land of our exile, we will sing it thus:
   
1.

    The cus-cus tattie's  soothin',
  With water sluicin' through,
    'Twas there that Annie Laurie
Ga'ed me–a waltz or two. 

Annie Laurie never gives anything else these days ... How shall we sing
the old songs in a strange land  ...   ?  ... Once more what would you?
Abolish the new and restore to their throne the songs of the past? 'Nature
brings not back the mastodon, nor we those days.' The ancient ditties
would fall flat in youngling ears. Something indeed might be done if we restored
them, so to speak; wrote them up to date, injecting into their pulseless veins the
mordant arsenic of local colour. 'Our grandmothers,' you write, 'sang
of the "Miller's Lovely Daughter." '  Let us take 'Allen Water'
and see how the last verse would go under the above conditions:—  
   
2.
By the swirling Sutlej water              
           When my three months' leave was o'er,
   There I sought the Colonel's daughter
But she smiled no more.               
For the Autumn fever caught her,     
And the funeral left at three—      
By the muddy Sutlej water,                 
None so dead as she.                      
  
Something like that, eh? You have one of the oldest tragedies in
 the world, new dressed. Placetne Domini? ... Let us try over another
 of your favourites, 'Auld Robin Gray'. 'Indefiniteness' was
the vice you complained of was it not? Does this suit you?
 
3.

An' I had been at Simla a week an' something more,     
              When I saw that bad boy Jamie come a ridin' to my door—
I saw that bad boy Jamie—I could na' think it he.          
                     Says he —'l've hooked a fortnight here to get a glimpse of thee'.
               I gasped—'How dare you do it?' We had heaps of things to say.
            He took a lot of kisses and he stayed through half the day,
But how could I be angry, for it's not my fault, you see,
If Auld Robin Gray would insist on weddin' me.      

                 Get some lady friend to sing this, as an encore verse, and note
                how the hopeless passionate wail of the last line suits the words.... 

                       [Here Pinney introduces an additional verse
                       in French, from the story of the traditional 
                    ballad "The Bailiff's daughter of Islington",
                     which is not included by Rutherford. It is
                      distinctly short on the romance of the original] 
   
4.
Je suis pauvre et sans ressource—
Prête: O prête moi ta bourse         
                      Ou ta montre pour me montre confiance—
Femme ! Je ne vous connais         
Et s'il faut me donner                     
Votre nom et des références.  
  

                       You would force upon a thin-blooded generation, the blatant
                     boisterousness of 'Drink to each lass'. We sing it otherwise:—  
     
5.
           Let the ice crash! Here's to each mash!
             Sip to your tarts in a nimbu esquash ...  

              [The distraught multitude of toilers] are ... likely to take the inspiring chorus 
                with which you so effectively close your sermon, and sing it in this manner:— 
     
6.
Should mere acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind?
      We'll give a dinner to the lot—they're done with when they've dined!
So ask the crew to dine my wife—yes, get the brutes to dine,         
And . . . don't kallie the degchies for the sake of Auld Lang Syne. 

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...and reports the derelict Mary Pollock
 still at sea; SHIPPING NEWS.

1
I was the staunchest of our fleet
    Till the sea rose beneath our feet
Unheralded, in hatred past all measure.
    Into his pits he stamped my crew,
    Buffeted, blinded, bound and threw,
Bidding me eyeless wait upon his pleasure.
2
  Man made me, and my will
    Is to my maker still,
Whom now the currents con, the rollers steer—
    Lifting forlorn to spy
    Trailed smoke along the sky,
Falling afraid lest any keel come near!
3
    Wrenched as the lips of thirst,
    Wried, dried, and split and burst,
Bone-bleached my decks, wind-scoured to the graining;
    And jarred at every roll
    The gear that was my soul
Answers the anguish of my beams’ complaining.
4
    For life that crammed me full,
    Gangs of the prying gull
That shriek and scrabble on the riven hatches!
    For roar that dumbed the gale,
    My hawse-pipes guttering wail,
Sobbing my heart out through the uncounted watches!
5
    Blind in the hot blue ring
    Through all my points I swing—
Swing and return to shift the sun anew.
    Blind in my well-known sky
    I hear the stars go by,
Mocking the prow that cannot hold one true!
6
    White on my wasted path
    Wave after wave in wrath
Frets ’gainst his fellow, warring where to send me.
    Flung forward, heaved aside,
    Witless and dazed I bide
The mercy of the comber that shall end me.
7
   North where the bergs careen,
   The spray of seas unseen
Smokes round my head and freezes in the falling;
    South where the corals breed,
   The footless, floating weed
Folds me and fouls me, strake on strake upcrawling.
8
    I that was clean to run
    My race against the sun—
Strength on the deep, am bawd to all disaster—
    Whipped forth by night to meet
    My sister’s careless feet,
And with a kiss betray her to my master!
9
    Man made me, and my will
    Is to my maker still—
To him and his, our peoples at their pier:
    Lifting in hope to spy
    Trailed smoke along the sky,
Falling afraid lest any keel come near!

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The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar—
Down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are.
There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,
Or the great grey level plains of ooze where the shell-burred cables creep.

Here in the womb of the world—here on the tie-ribs of earth
Words, and the words of men, flicker and flutter and beat—
Warning, sorrow and gain, salutation and mirth—
For a Power troubles the Still that has neither voice nor feet.

They have wakened the timeless Things; they have killed their father Time
Joining hands in the gloom, a league from the last of the sun.
Hush! Men talk to-day o'er the waste of the ultimate slime,
And a new Word runs between: whispering, 'Let us be one!' 

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Who in the Realm to-day lays down dear life for the sake of a land more dear?
And, unconcerned for his own estate, toils till the last grudged sands have run?
Let him approach. It is proven here
Our King asks nothing of any man more than Our King himself has done. 

For to him above all was Life good, above all he commanded
Her abundance full-handed.
The peculiar treasure of Kings was his for the taking:
All that men come to in dreams he inherited waking. 

His marvel of world-gathered armies—one heart and all races;
His seas ’neath his keels when his war-castles foamed to their places;
The thundering foreshores that answered his heralded landing;
The huge lighted cities adoring, the assemblies upstanding;
The Councils of Kings called in haste to learn how he was minded—
The Kingdoms, the Powers, and the Glories he dealt with unblinded. 

To him came all captains of men, all achievers of glory,
Hot from the press of their battles they told him their story.
They revealed him their lives in an hour and, saluting, departed,
Joyful to labour afresh: he had made them new-hearted.
And, since he weighed men from his youth, and no lie long deceived him,
He spoke and exacted the truth, and the basest believed him. 

And God poured him an exquisite wine, that was daily renewed to him,
In the clear-welling love of his peoples that daily accrued to him.
Honour and service we gave him, rejoicingly fearless;
Faith absolute, trust beyond speech and a friendship as peerless.
And since he was Master and Servant in all that we asked him,
We leaned hard on his wisdom in all things, knowing not how we tasked him. 

For on him each new day laid command, every tyrannous hour,
To confront, or confirm, or make smooth some dread issue of power;
To deliver true judgment aright at the instant, unaided,
In the strict, level, ultimate phrase that allowed or dissuaded;
To foresee, to allay, to avert from us perils unnumbered,
To stand guard on our gates when he guessed that the watchmen had slumbered;
To win time, to turn hate, to woo folly to service and, mightily schooling
His strength to the use of his Nations, to rule as not ruling.
These were the works of our King; Earth’s peace was the proof of them.
God gave him great works to fulfil, and to us the behoof of them.  

We accepted his toil as our right—none spared, none excused him.
When he was bowed by his burden his rest was refused him.
We troubled his age with our weakness—the blacker our shame to us!
Hearing his People had need of him, straightway he came to us.
As he received so he gave-nothing grudged, naught denying,
Not even the last gasp of his breath when he strove for us, dying.
For our sakes, without question, he put from him all that he cherished.
Simply as any that serve him he served and he perished.
All that Kings covet was his, and he flung it aside for us.
Simply as any that die in his service he died for us! 

Who in the Realm to-day has choice of the easy road or the hard to tread?
And, much concerned for his own estate, would sell his soul to remain in the sun?
Let him depart nor look on Our dead.
Our King asks nothing of any man more than Our King himself has done. 

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