Months: The Sea: May

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. 

   There are four epigraphs for the entire "Months: The Sea" sequence and they are posted at the head of the March poem.

   I forgot to mention in the March posting that 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 do not appear to have written much else specifically about May. I've found two poems: "May Fragment," written in May 2015 and posted on 15 November 2019, is linked here, and "Spring and Meaning," written in February 2014 and posted on 21 November 2016, is linked here.

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(Month of the Blessed Virgin Mary)

When the tide brims, the sea, you would think, might leap
Its broad basin; it looms over the beach strip
Like syrup taut in its own thickness, lazy
   But suddenly deep.

At shore grey-green though cobalt-blue at distance,
Flashed with white horses, it slaps, plucks, the pier struts,
Gargling, and darkening the limpets and weed
   Supine in its jaunts.

Post-lunch, in convoy, dinghies assay the year’s
First race – ducklings docile in the May-mild haze;
The sun, now hot, smudged to thinness, high and small,
   If stared at makes tears.

Wet-suited (year-young, the water’s cold as frost),
A father teaches risk to his wave-tumbled
Daughter, otter-lithe, crowing as, upended,
   She handstands like a post.

Quivering on air, gulls quarter the beach, tensed
To steal; trippers, wind-pink, incautious as lambs,
Display their sauced burgers, swag to the curt gulls
   For all will be flensed.

Café society! Warmth and the skin-balm air
Tempt tables and chairs, the “quality” in high-
End casuals take coffee, lunch done, still grazing
   On a fat éclair:

Croque Monsieur ou Madame, carafes of Sancerre,
Bottles of Keller Pils, and now Espresso
Or Cortado: how fine to stretch limbs, relax,
   Confidingly share

The year’s project – expansion, promotion, new
Directions, travel: but voyager look north!
Over the hills, blue indeed, the clouds are thick –
   Cumulus, whose hue

Of grey sobriety imposes grim forethought
That though self-sure doing, choice, enthusing of
The swarming mass, enthralled in sheer aggregate,
   Lie inland – ah sought

After in spades! – so do dog eat dog treachery,
Ruthlessness, politics (tautologous?), in
Fact sin! He who stumbles is threshed by fixed-faced
   Peons whose hurry

Drives anguish that life pays at piece rate except
Winner take all. Sin? Of a trice we sound depths
For sin is but Will, and who steps from his door
   But that his will stept?

John Medlin's Thanks to Mrs Susan Horton

To those who know, this poem will need no introduction. But for the others: the Catholic Church went mad after the disastrous Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. It destroyed its immemorial liturgy in an effort to be "with it" and persecuted all those who remained attached to the ancient liturgy. The great unsung saint, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, established the Society of St Pius X (SSPX) to protect and spread the old liturgy. He, too, was persecuted by Rome. Today, the SSPX is a worldwide force.

   Mrs Susan Horton, like many other lay people, spent many years working tirelessly to support the SSPX and she is sorely missed. The SSPX uses the Missal of 1962 in its liturgies and completely rejects Pope Paul's disembowelled "new rite" missal of 1970. Many, however, prefer the pre-1962 Missal (myself included) as the fullest expression of Catholic faith and worship. The SSPX has established schools throughout the world. In the UK its St Michael's School is almost the only school teaching the genuine and full Catholic faith. At the end of Part One, "the Bergoglian revolt" refers, of course, to the recent disastrous papacy of Pope Francis (Jorge Mario Bergoglio). "Indietrist" (backwardist) was his scornful insult directed at those who clung to the Tradition he actively attacked. For much more information see the SSPX English website!

   Part Two uses the form of W.B. Yeats's "John Kinsella's Lament for Mrs Mary Moore" which is a wonderful poem but completely profane. I think I had thoughts of "cleansing it" by using it to memorialize Mrs Horton: perhaps I should have used a different form.

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I.
What serendipity, though graced and guided
By His great hand, it is when unawares
One takes a step which, much like Frost’s forked path,
Results in life’s occasions – fruits or tares –
Resolving to a thankful final end.
Fierce Mrs Horton, keeper of the chapel’s
Devotionals and haut-indietrist book stall,
(A chapel served by faithful priests – “bad apples”
Written off by the Popes’ post-Council Church),
Took me in hand when first I found Tradition,
Guiding my doubtings Truthwards, quarantined
From Council shallowness and its admission
Of satan’s kitsch into the House of Faith.
One Sunday after Mass, knowing I lacked
A Missal, turning to a window ledge
Where books much-used but surplus now were stacked,
Selecting one she said, “Take this,” and thrust
A time-torn Missal in my hand. I gabbled

My thanks, retiring to inspect this prize

In a nearby café where, intrigued, I dabbled

Its dowdy pages, puzzling that there seemed

“Discrepancies” compared to the “Sixty-Two” –
The Missal used for all the chapel’s rites.
Well, frequent use, both home and in the pew,
Revealed the reason: Mrs Horton’s gift
Was of a 1940s Missal, thus
Complete with Great Week rites not yet “reformed”
And Calendar not yet “improved” – that fuss
For civil servants’ “tidiness” which broke
A generation’s faith, and as a gibe
Produced, at last, Pope Paul’s amoebic Mass,
Committee-made by men half-clown, half-scribe.
What depths of doctrine, nodes of pious truths,
What praisings’ vaults are held in that “old” book
Which sanctified worldwide the Church’s worship
Prior the Council’s folly, and with a look
Can crush the new rite’s tickbox childishness.
Dear Mrs Horton, what a seed you sowed!
I pray your Missal daily, loose with age,
Elastic-banded: foot-mate on the road,
Dialogist when at my desk, confessor
Crouched on my knees; and so until my death!
   Enough. I thought to sketch and analyse,
To catch her whole, but that’s a waste of breath:
Suffice to say she was irascible
(To me, the backward-slider!), always tough,
Untiring, and insistent on the Truth
That is Tradition; so, she scorned the fluff
Posing for now as Catholic catechesis
(The Faith can neither change nor contradict
Itself), and saw the True Mass of the Martyrs
As guard and future of a Faith re-quicked
Once Rome’s louche love-clasp with the heresies
Was broken. Gone now to the Lord’s reward,
The chapel where she strove still thrives, its prayer
And sacramental life innately moored
In what the Church has always done (and meant) –
Refusing the Bergoglian revolt,
Its thuggish quackery. Her memory’s
In this: indomitable and sharp as salt!

Penzance: Six Occasional Poems

Note: “An October Gale” is based on the form of stanzas 2 and 3 of Thomas Campion’s “A Day, A Night”; “Turnstones” is based on the form of his “Never Weather-Beaten Sail”; “A Blithe and Bonny City Lass” is based on Thomas Lodge’s “A Blithe and Bonny Country Lass”; “The Settled Life” uses the form (feminine line endings) of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 87 “Farewell, Thou Art Too Dear for My Possessing”; “A Newlyn Roundelay” uses the form of Spenser’s roundelay “It Fell Upon a Holy Eve” (from the August eclogue in “The Shepherds’ Calendar”) and “November Damp” is based on the form of Thomas Dekker’s “Art Thou Poor” (from “Patient Grissill). All these poems are in Patricia Thomson’s highly enjoyable, and useful, anthology “Elizabethan Lyrical Poets” (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1967).

   Obviously, all places mentioned in the poems are real, either in Penzance or the adjacent Newlyn. Penwith is the area of West Cornwall. "Emmets" is the local name for incomers and holiday-makers. A "Bucca" is a proud, born and bred Newlyn resident.

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An October Gale

    A gale swept in, and greyed the day:
    It greyed the day through thickened rain;
    That thickened rain was flung as spray,
    Was flung as spray by wind’s distrain;
    The wind’s distrain upturned the bay:
    A gale swept in, and greyed the day.

The water’s ankle-deep in Daniel Place!
The ramping waves engulf the prom then drain!
In New Street soaking wind distorts your face!
And Rosevean Road’s a howling gulf in pain!
At noon all’s twilight – streets gone brown like mace!
Ouf! Wave shocks rock the town’s length, brace and brace!

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Turnstones

   Turnstones turning stones for hours in hope their food to find,
   Shore and pool and waves’ frothed edge have haunt time out of mind;
Compact, chestnut-brown, black-bibbed, yet stark with whited underparts,
   Twitting liquidly they dash, pale-legged, about their arts.

   Wolfing hoppers, morsels, mites, like monks they duck and bow,
   Hour by hour they feed or die, for life’s a constant now;
Spooked, they launch and fleet along the wave line, wings’ black bars on show;
   Settled, feeding and their breeding urge are all they know.

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A Blithe and Bonny City Lass

A blithe and bonny city lass,
   Hey ho the city lass,
Sat on her fore-step, out of place,
   Mourning her luck, which way she turned.
Came one who had a gentle way,
   Hey ho a gentle way,
   Fair hair, good wits which earned his pay,
   Who caught her eye, and so she yearned.

Her pert light beauty, seamed by life,
   Hey ho seamed by life,
Quite seized his love thoughts, made them thrive.
   “I have a child: take me, take her,”
She warned. He swore, “She’ll be my own,”
   Hey ho “she’ll be my own.”
   Love’s heat drew both, they made their moan,
   And so, content, one-fleshed they were.

He took that woman and her child,
   Hey ho and her child,
Far west to where the waves are wild.
   In Penzance town they wove their nest
Among granite streets, wind-wet and cold,
   Hey ho wind-wet and cold,
   But love’s first joys made all to gold
   (Always his hand was at her breast).

Well, all must cool: life duns for rent,
   Hey ho life duns for rent;
Their food is budget, work is scant,
   The girl begs frills that aren’t to have:
The woman’s baulked, tongue-sharp and grey,
   Hey ho tongue-sharp and grey,
   For he’s in drink, with eyes that stray,
   His hair unwashed, and boozed of breath:

And fate should warn each pretty peat,
   Hey ho each pretty peat,
That smicker men are rancid meat,
   And love’s a trudge through life to death.

(Note: "peat" means pet, merry girl, or simply girl. "Smicker" means beautiful, handsome.)

----------

Months: The Sea: April

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, so scroll down to view, or link to it here.

   There are four epigraphs for the entire "Months: The Sea" sequence and they are posted at the head of the March poem.

   I forgot to mention in the March posting that each poem carries an ascription of the liturgical importance of the month (for April the "Month of the Resurrection"). These ascriptions were widely used in the pre-Vatican II Church: they were yet another casualty of the destructive consequences of that foolish Council.

   Apart from the three Months series I can only find two other poems of mine specifically about April: both are short. "April Wind," written in April 1981, was posted on 31 March 2012 and is linked here. "April Heavy Days," a sonnet, was written in April 2014, was posted on 8 June 2017 and is linked here.

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(Month of the Resurrection)

It scours, it scours – the tide I mean – muscled, deep-bodied,
   Clenched in the harbour’s channel like a snake;
Silent and solid, shoddied brown and man-devouring,
   It speeds with the world’s ache to reach the sea.

Behind the harbour piles, a sandy ledge of cobbles
   Has hoarded droves – tiny, translucent, whole –
Of baby crab shells – obols flung by mindless nature,
   Dead before living, goal lacking all point.

All’s tragic, rightly seen: to Physics’ law-bound endings,
   Known in the constant grab and gulp of the sea’s
Ruthless inmates, man’s fendings, blazed as self-sufficient,
   Are futile stutters, breezed autonomies

And flourishings which, virus-hit or harvests failing,
   Collapse to windvane creatures gabbling prayers
To what? An own-self God, ailingly mawkish, neutered
   By faint belief. What flares along the shore?

A biplane, first of many as the year relaxes,
   Its petrol engine clacking, prop a daze:
Ah, screwed and soldered praxis of the self-puffed skillsman!
   Preferring staider ways, the beach-gear ton

Repaint their status-stripey beach huts for the season.
   Wonders are many, sang Sophocles, and none
More so than man, but reason soured by lah-dah graces
   Is like wax in the sun, gleek and unfirm,

And leached of virtue, its point d’etat, quails like a slavey
   Before a herring gull’s unfeeling stare:
Face on, it peers from mauvey wings, its flatline forehead
   And hunger-purposed glare, the nostril slits,

The socket slits for the frowned eyes, and the malignant
   Projectile of its beak, ivoried, hooked,
Poising to butcher, faux-indignant, red spot gleaming,
   Announce, bell and booked, finis for its prey.

Ah, flashes, frozen-stepped, the Four Last Things! – there’s Judgement
   Chivvying Death, Bliss, and the Other Place,
And loathsomely that Lodgement gluts on uncount numbers
   Who crimefully abased their intellects:

The challenge as at tourney is to win the prize-good
   Gifting a knowledge into carking death’s
Meaninged-noneness, its sackhood blackness torn to shreddings,
   Or life’s engathered breaths will dry unplused.

What’s horrored, grappled chest to chest, is gross extinction
   Which oxymorons meaning, concept, truth;
Nice pecks of ticklish unction, meant-well but degrounded,
   Will wrench to uncouth screeching, “Sauve qui peut!”

What saves? Looms like a hard-sought light-gleam in a seaway
   The Incarnation, plain but mazed in sight,
The Crucifixion – hearsay? – follows, then Redemption
   And Resurrection, bright though bloody-won;

These Four gift comprehension which confirms the purpose
   Of world and all in Justice’ final hest,
Their tout intincts the campus which, long centuries fallen,
   Now rescued is blessed, conjugal with the One.

Looking Babies

Patricia Thomson (ed. “Elizabethan Lyrical Poets,” Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967) says of “The Extasie,” “This poem has been subject to more comment and analysis than any other of Donne’s.” As regards “looking babies”(line 4) she says, “The phenomenon by which a person sees his image reflected in the pupil of another was called 'looking babies.'"
   The (very) basic argument of "The Extasie" is: the lovers' two souls leave the body in love's ecstasy, uniting into one soul somewhere beyond. But this soul misses the body which is the proper home of souls in this world. Hence, the one becomes two again, descending into the lovers' bodies, and able to be a lesson to others. It's best to read "The Extasie" yourselves.

   This poem alternates trochaic tetrameter stanzas with alexandrine stanzas. In the alexandrines the fourth syllable of the first line rhymes with the third to last and last syllables of the second line.

   For another view of love, this time from those who haven't found it yet, read my "The Vigil of Venus," written in March 1981 and posted on this blog on 9 April 2012. It is linked here.

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(An Extrapolation from John Donne’s “The Extasie”)

      Eye to eye and breast to breast,
      You look east and I’ll look west;
      Clasped, there’s no more “yours” and “my”s,
      Looking babies in our eyes.

Pillowed or banked, and helpless as a violet,
We lay, hands twined, each lost in loving, flanked and shanked.

      Well, the fleshed and feeling end
      Love’s arched delvings all intend,
      Nine months in the womb will hold,
      Then squeeze out to stretch and scold!

Our bodies two'd, our single active soul create
Which, greater, homes our unfull selves, now newed and trued.

      Strollered, then on foot, that one
      Seizes life and’s never done;
      Growing, mind work twins with world,
      Conscious bodyhood’s unfurled.

Absent, soul turns, knows body is its daily place,
Descends, now our two souls, mixed in what yearns or spurns.

      Hormones urge, when body’s ripe,
      Mind agrees and looks for type;
      Found, soul-swooned and eye to eye,
      Love’s conceiving’s by and by.

Affects and sense, re-grammared in the body’s book,
Tell truths to seekers, tempered by love’s “whence” and “hence.”

====================
© November 2023

A Love Memory

This lyric uses phrases taken from Ephesians 6, 5 - 8 (King James Bible). The phrases appear in the order in which they appear in the verses. I do not recall why I chose to use the holy text in a (very) secular poem. I will not do it again. There is also an echo in the second stanza of St John's Gospel, 5: 8.
   The shrike is also known as the butcher bird from its habit of impaling its victims on thorns or spikes.

   As a rueful conspectus of some past loves and time's scourge, I wrote "Down to Death" in May 2015 and posted it on 11 December 2019. There's a link here.

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      According to the flesh, I loved
         And lost a she unlike;
      Petite and warm, my thoughts she doved,
         Though inward she was tough:
      Those love-gripped gaspings, leg-wrapped haspings,
      Intimacies of bed and board,
         Were thorn-stuck like the shrike
         Who pikes its helpless prey,
When, losing faith, declaring that she’d had enough –
   Such fear and trembling at those sudden waspings! –
            She plunged and gored
   In singleness of heart, and went her way.

      Now what’s of spirit that can staunch
         Eyeservice of the kind,
      Menpleasers with a shaken haunch,
         Gulfing the lusting male?
      Might mind’s belayings wring betrayings,
      Gentling passion to rise and take
         Its bed, now love has pined
         (For, truth, life waits for none)?
All must, with good will doing service, find avail
   In years’ drudge, and forbearance of behavings,
            That, then, love’s quake
   Again, might, with the bond or free, be won.

====================
© October 2023

Months: The Sea: March

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 beginning to post them as I revise them. I will put some notes about each poem's form and references at the end of each post. But I note here that each of the Months sequences begins with March - the month of the Annunciation and for centuries the beginning of the civil year.

   There are four epigraphs for the entire "Months: The Sea" sequence (the Biblical quotes are from the Catholic Douay-Rheims translation):

By the word of the Lord the heavens were established; and all the power of them by the spirit of His mouth: gathering together the waters of the sea, as in a vessel; laying up the depths in storehouses. Let all the earth fear the Lord, and let all the inhabitants of the world be in awe of Him. (Psalm 32, v 6-8)

How great are Thy works, O Lord; Thou hast made all things in wisdom: the earth is filled with Thy riches. So is this great sea, which stretcheth wide its arms: there are creeping things without number: creatures little and great. There the ships shall go. (Psalm 103, v 24-26)

Then the Lord answered Job out of a whirlwind, and said: Who is this that wrappeth up sentences in unskilful words? (Job 38, v 1-2)

"Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence; tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence. (George Santayana)

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(Month of St Joseph the Worker)

Early morning, tide out: the beach shingle rattles
Beneath foot; the sand flats, hide-brown and low leaning,
Stretch to the far sea, sigh-falling in misty mauve.
   Here, there, are herring gulls preening.

A cold wind and low cloud in this gull-calling sphere
Make a grey stifling day, though restless with promise
For trigger-Equinox is near; the black-head gulls
   Are black-headed again; Momus

Was wittily apt, crafting their red-beaked, hooded
Circus capers, petite and touchy. Warily
Winging, they snub my crackling lurch through the shingle –
   A penance to walk on, slyly

Turning ankles or sinking a foot dead. At sea,
Distant around the offshore reefs, dried toothily
By the spring tides, the crabbers heel, wrestling with traps;
   Their launching tractor, forlornly

Dismissed, rust-patched with eczema, squats on the pooled
Sands, its tracks grooved from the beach top like a ploughman’s
Furrows. Curses and battering as pots are decked
   Sift on the wind through the no-man’s

Waves. How harsh, how harsh! this daily wrenching, salt-scoured,
Wind-drilled, desperate for feedstuffs, captured bloodied
And flesh-torn – in the marshy fields, from the soused rocks
   Or far at sea. Mere scraps, muddied

And stinking, a crab claw perhaps, are spitefully
Fought for by gulls, wings inter-grappled, beaks clashing,
Screeching like harpies; deep sea, a trawler hand screams,
   His arm sucked in a winch, hashing

To blood-pudding in pain-crushed seconds; or a net
Being shot whips a man’s legs, flinging him flailing
Into Alp-like seas, lugging him to the depth-ooze
   Where net-wrapped he totters, mouthing

Water like Phlebas, these two weeks dead. In lash up
Workshops on harbour walls, greased lumps of gear, rusted
And work-bleached, are clattered and drilled by wind-burnt men;
   Then, fingers crossed, to be hoisted

Back to the bowels of some crank, stained tramp, afloat
(If its pumps work) by luck and patching. For, ever,
They that trouble the sea in ships have high-rolled fate,
   Sound seams and glowering weather.