In 2012-13 I wrote a series of shorter poems on the months of the year using a similar form for each poem. I posted the complete set of "Months" on 6 February 2015 and it is linked here. In 2014-15 I wrote a series of lyrics on the year's months, called "Months: Lyrics" and that series was posted on 11 March 2016. It is linked here. Between 2019 and 2024 I wrote a third "Months" series, this time concentrating on the sea and littoral and using a wide range of forms. The poems were also much longer and much more discursive. I am now posting them as I revise them. I will put some notes about each poem's form and references at the end of each post. The first poem in this sea series (for March) was posted on Friday 25 May 2025, link to it here; the poem for April was posted on 28 July 2025, link to it here; that for May, posted 20 September 2025, is linked here; that for June, posted on Monday 27 April 2026, here, that for July, posted on Thursday 18 June 2026, here.
There are four epigraphs for the entire "Months: The Sea" sequence and they are posted at the head of the March poem.
Each poem carries an ascription of the liturgical importance of the month. These ascriptions were widely used in the pre-Vatican II Church: they were yet another casualty of the destructive consequences of that foolish Council.
I have written a handful of other poems about August. But first an ancient poem, from October 1981, which is non-specifically set in summer, is "To an Acquaintance Gone Into the Country," posted on this blogsite on 14 July 2012. It is linked here. Two more recent poems are "On a Hot August Day," written in September 2013 and posted on 23 December 2015 (linked here) and "A Mosquito Bite," written in August 2014 and posted on 8 May 2017 (linked here).
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(Month of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary)
Hwæt!
August for the people | next the purple sea:
The seasons have found stasis, | if sort of, only;
The people, fagged, | have flocked to the resorts,
Blanking the nay-sayers, | their “never send to know...,”
With a grunted guttural | “give us a break;”
Hence, this Sunday | several only
Will chant in church, | in chapel, hosannas
To He who makes clean, | He who invigorates,
(“Were not ten cleansed: | where cloister the nine?”):
Rather, by nine, | wrangling families
Or passing alliances | of loosely-made friends
Will stake the beach, | assert dominion
In the house-high dunes, | foot-hot already
For already the sun | like solder, heat-white,
Has swaddled the shore | with a steam-bath fug:
Like travellers pitched, | there’s towels and chairs,
Windbreaks, barbeques, | and blankets thrown,
Chill case and sunshades | and smattering boom-box:
Bodies are stripped, | bloated with feeding,
Blotched with yesterday’s | blistered sunburn;
A few are toe-paddling | the temperate sea,
Wary so soon | of a wet-body plunge,
Though sterner, task-rapt, | two kayakers
Are pulling their craft | from their portable sheaths,
Eager to engage | with the easy-fall waves:
Haply, the Azores high | has hoist itself
Across the earth’s camber, | accruing fine weather,
If temper-trying heat, | for non-torrid man,
The speech-bearer, now sotto-ing | expletives as midges
And wasps ferret | his pheromone-sweated skin.
Along the beach, | a black-head gull
Winnows a wing, | wobbling on one leg,
The other stretched: | widely, it yawns,
Its brown head moulting, | mouldering to white,
Leaving two dots blobbed, | backed behind its eyes.
The immature herrings, | haphazard in plumage,
Brown-patched as ticking | pulled from a palliasse,
Bully among themselves, | squeaking their long-calls
Like unoiled screws turning, | ignored by the adults
Perched on groyne posts, | picture perfect,
Which, sylphed with glistening | girls’-hair weed,
Slope out to sea, | sinking beneath
The glass-clear water, | graving shadow lines
Like ribs under flesh. | A rich haze
Hangs at the horizon, | happenstancing the distance –
No sky, no sea, | just a screen, pigeon-blue:
A trawler, full-loaded, | levitates through heaven,
Returning to harbour | to unheave its catch,
Its engines evenly | echoing the waters,
A “V,” bay-wide, | vectoring from its stern.
A harrowing heat | like a hand’s clench
Has wrapped all bodies | in its rivelling sweat,
The windlack beach | is a’broil and buzzing
With sun’s radiation, | simmering and raw:
On the prom, a flung | flash of light
From an opening window | pierces a watcher
With a seared lance | of locused heat,
As if Transfiguration | had torn Its way
Into this Adam’s world, | adumbrating truths
Which beach-fun humans | are huffy to resist.
The holiday funfair | is hollering loudly
By noon. The Sizzler, | XLR8TR, [= Accelerator!]
Xtreme Power | and Project Orbiter,
The Super Waltzer, | the Speedodrome –
All scintillate | with screams and laughter,
Cannonading music | and cataclysmic lights,
Dry ice irruptions, | all detonated by
Jammering generators. | Generations mell,
Close-crushed, careening | the colour-bright stalls;
Dazed dogs leapingly | dance on leads,
Gulls corkscrew between legs, | levering up scraps,
And wheelchairs and buggies | byway the crowds,
Dumbfaced as dodgems, | for the dense, the young,
The aged, the crippled, | all aggregate a role
In this middle-earth’s microcosm. | Maddened by fun,
Inebriate of excitement | and odour of meats
Charring at burger stands, | these champions might laugh though
At the groans of Laurence | grilling on an iron,
The moralled animal | murderous to pay cash
To baste him bellowing | in his browning juices,
“Amo” now “odi.” | All afternoon
The humid hug | of the hammering sun
Has hotted the sands, | hammed with folk
Like stolid homesteaders, | stubborn to flee
The stink of the seine nets | slung up to dry,
Poled at the beach top. | A brown bloom
Of suppurating seaweed | slops in the wave-break,
Draping the bodies | of dipping bathers:
A huge crab | in its crenellated shell
Scuttles from the teasing | of a troublesome child.
Soared in blue depths | a slim-winged glider
Is towed by a biplane, | bull-nosed and determined;
It slips and banks, and silently the glider,
Slowly, steadily, | sun-silver-glinted
Assumes the heavens, | havening serenely:
So, once, the Virgin One | was vaulted beyond the spheres
That Christ might have a pleader | for Cain’s cronies,
Their hot-headed rioting | to hate ungivingly,
Helplessly cartwheeled | by the canny Trickster,
Prostituting amity | that all must stagger,
Net-flung and trapped, | neutering justice,
Violently venting | to virtue’s founder:
For language is man’s, | his modulus of hate,
And behind rage’s rags | he recognizes wrong
And wringing his hands | knows right by prompt
Of natural law: | lawfully therefore
He’s lictored and judged, | even as laid on the beach,
Time-outing and sweltering | between spring’s conspectus
And autumn’s dividends, | he detours in pleasure:
Soon, then, or late, | lollards or loyalists,
All must cry pax, | pleadingly accepting
What’s the case and its consequence, | concurring submittingly
In action’s reaction, | the unction of Christ-life
Which, mediated by Mary, | manages all
To their sole Just ends: | saved or no,
Truth is tough, | thus, trashed on the beach,
Bloodied and ripped | by some boltering fox,
Are the wings and backbone | of a one-year gull
Gnawed of all flesh: | fallen, blood-lusted,
Hunted is the world, | wrathful till Redemption.
Nine pm: what roaring | roistering at the front,
Garishly glamoured, | gleamed and rainbowed
By the prom’s and funfair’s | fusillading lights.
It’s crowded, still humid, | humanly-agitated;
A band barnstorms | in the bandstand, ecstatic;
The rides and roundabouts | rocket in frenzy,
Though a few steps on the beach, | bantering families
Gather for the kids-excited | cascading of fireworks.
In the darkened west | a last dreg of violet
Bromided and died | like a browning photograph;
Ascended, intense, | tremoring Venus,
Whitely-corona’d, | waymarked the sky,
Homaged by Saturn, | specked in the east.
In the day for night dark | the daggled waves
Huskily cream-spread | the hessian sands,
Pondered by the people | on the pebble banks,
The appetitive ones, | hungered for sensation
And eyes’ and ears’ thrill; | so thrilled, St Cajetan,
Cajoler of souls, | might slavey for an age
Offering Heaven’s goods | to gainsaying man.
Lights’ pin-points at the pier’s end, | poised over sea,
Then: immaculate geometries | mount in the skies,
Thunderously shattering | to shards of all colours,
Soaring-shillying, falling-fumacious, | shimmying-sequined, glittering-glissading,
Multiversed explosions | of spectrumed glories,
Whiting the high clouds | into one-second’s day;
They shudder the beach | to the shouts of children
And parents’ applause, | whilst plenitudes of smoke
Drift on the waters: | a drum-racketing finale
Of Etna’s great rainbows | resonates. And all’s dark.
The stones are still warm. | Staggering the sight –
Night’s amphitheatre | amplituded by the moon’s
High-risen, full-bodied | bronze-gold medallion,
Its horizon-wide light | lucidly haloing
The lambswool Pleiades | and low-lying Sirius,
Lacquering the sea. | Lights and engine-howl
Clenchingly chorus, | clattering offshore –
’Choppers and lifeboats, | a “languishing” trawler,
Practise a rescue: | ropemen from the ’choppers
Acrobat in mid-air, | arcing to the trawler,
The lifeboats circling, | their sumptuous wakes
Piled white at their sterns, | the whacking roar
Of the ’copters’ rotors | riddling the waves
To a frenzied fluster, | flappingly flattened:
Like constellations | occulting obliviously
The twitching lights | of towns and farmsteads,
Coast-strung, clittered, | careless of the noise-storm;
For man the altruist, | actioning for others,
(His genes made germane | by gingering telos),
Has ever shoved | against the shrug of mere chemistry,
And muffling his mindedness | to turn “amigo” to “outlaw,”
Fighting his slaver | for sensation, which is chemistry
(How the Trickster marvels | at our mule-like molecules!),
He, like Augustine, | augering in Hippo,
Urgent to understand | and unguent his fidgeting,
And noting of things | their needful regularity –
Neither man nor meaning | would be manifold without it –
Finds this meaning’s meaning | must manifest from God,
The That which thisses us, | and thus we care.
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© September-October 2021. Revised August-September 2026
Notes:
This poem consists of six sections, each of thirty lines, and is written in the alliterative verse of the Anglo-Saxons – “Beowulf” being the most famous example. The same metre was used by W. H. Auden in his long poem “The Age of Anxiety.” There are some variants but the rules I used are: each line has a variable number of syllables but with four main stresses, two before a caesura and two afterwards. At least one of the two stresses before the caesura must alliterate with the first stress after the caesura. Usually the fourth stress does not alliterate, but can as occasion falls. The stresses are usually consonantal but can be vowels, in which case any of the vowels can alliterate. Strict Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse had a number of other requirements which, given the nature of my material, I ignored.
Sections 1 and 4 are written as one long sentence; sections 2 and 5 have sentences which can end anywhere; sections 3 and 6 have sentences which end within the line.
Most Anglo-Saxon verse was oral and the bards would begin their recitation with the call Hwæt! which usually means “what” but as used by the bards meant “hear me” or “listen.”
Each of the 12 "Months: The Sea" poems makes reference to some of the saints and/or major festivals of that month as memorialized in the pre-1955 Catholic Missal – the true Missal!
Section 1: Line 1: “August for the people…” is borrowed from Auden’s poem “To A Writer On His Birthday”; line 4: “never send to know…” is taken from John Donne’s Meditation XVII (“Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions”); line 9: “Were not ten cleansed…”, see Luke 17: 11-19; line 26: In high summer the continual high pressure system around the Azores Islands moves north to cover the south west of England and bring hot weather.
Section 2: Line 5: “two dots blobbed…”: blackhead gulls are only black headed in the spring and summer breeding season; they then moult to a white head but with two residual patches behind their eyes, making them look four-eyed; line 9: “Like unoiled screws turning”: anyone who has heard immature gulls trying to copy the long-call of adult gulls will know what I mean; line 28: the mighty miracle of the Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ is recorded in Matthew 17: 1-8, Mark 9: 2-9 and Luke 9: 28-36
Section 3: Line 18: St Laurence the Deacon was roasted alive on a gridiron in August AD 258 and has always been venerated as one of the great martyrs of the Catholic Church.
Section 4: Line 6: “vaulted beyond the spheres…,” i.e. the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary body and soul into Heaven, where she is constantly busy as Mediator (line 24) for mankind and in fact Co-Redemptrix by will of the Lord Jesus whose work on the Cross was of course decisive.
Section 5: Line 18: St Cajetan because of his patience and determination was known as “the hunter of souls.”
Section 6: Line 20: “telos,” i.e. ultimate end, purpose or aim; line 25: St Augustine was one of the greatest Doctors of the Church. His works, e.g. his thinking on the nature of time and being, can still make the secular so-called thinkers of our own time look like infants.
