A Wild Penzance Night

This poem is in syllabics with a count of eight and ten. All lines have four stresses, the pattern being variable. All line endings are masculine, except the couplet at lines 23/24 - why, I don't know; I must have failed to pay attention. Of course, syllabic poems with even counts run the risk of being read as uneven tetrameters, pentameters or whatever. Many of these problems were explored by Elizabeth Daryush, a sadly-neglected poet now, in her fascinating syllabic poems. She even wrote syllabic rhyming sonnets in ten syllable lines - that really does stretch things a bit.
   Often when a full gale hits the British Isles the effect is illustrated on TV and in newspapers by shots of the London-bound Intercity train pulling away from Penzance station. The line runs on an embankment right next to the sea (when the tide's in); the train can be engulfed - spectacularly - by breaking waves.
   I posted another poem about Penzance wind and rain on 2 March 2015 - 'A Penzance Ballad'; there's a link here.

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Walking the streets of Penzance town
As the sea wind growls and the dusk dips brown,
The rain clatters on granite flags
And the wind flurries my trousers to rags;
Out in the bay the black sea toils
And the spray on the prom hurtles in coils;
The rocking street lamps wetly gleam,
The glistening gulls maraud through their beam;
Later, roosting on streaming eaves,
They groaningly doze as the big wind heaves.
Down at the bayside station, lights,
Sodium-red, are all glitters and brights,
Bustled by brute gusts whilst the train
For London creeps on the tracks through the rain.
At Eastern Green on the town’s edge,
On top of the rock bank shivered with sedge,
The train’s ensoused by breaking waves
Which thunder against it like men with staves;
Only then does it quit the shore,
Weaving inland under the wind’s hoarse roar.
Back in the town that wind rebounds
From corner to corner like packs of hounds,
Rushing with howls in rough chases,
Leaping at midriffs, snapping in faces.
The last of twilight singes clouds,
Dragging their rusty petticoats like dowds;
The circling hills, by day matt-green,
Erased in gloom have abandoned the scene.
In Mounts Bay with deck lamps ablaze,
A trawler staggers its way through the craze
Of breakers and spume, striving for
Harboured safety and the rain-sopping shore.
Frantic in the bay, Low Lee buoy,
Its light flashing like a child’s broken toy,
Toboggans waves, flounders in troughs,
Whilst the wind batters it, whistles and coughs.
Such is the scene this autumn-time
In a salt-wet town of granite and grime,
Where the gulls catwalk, scream and fight,
Unsettled in the gale-washed Penzance night.

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© August 2014