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)
Apposite then, that meaning’s locus, that Bon which
Enharbours sea workers’ lives, their wave-sunk dyings,
Fruited in a workshop, though dry miles from the sea,
In a province panned by sneerings
(As often with seaboard lands) as backward, inbred
(Doubtless) and infra dig. Yes, and Joseph grunting
At his bench, juggling ripsaw and awl, nails blackened,
Hands torn and infected, risked gouging
Or worse, like some Newlyn tar. Panting beside him,
The Word struggled with rough-planed planks, taking splinters
In His palms. Next roomed, the Pure One, shoulders aching,
Kneaded dough to bake in trenchers.
Bread and sweat, wounds and pain, these are the gross rockbed
Of the Ransom. Thanks to He who mercifully
Willed Salutation, that Jesse’s root should blossom!
For, the Great Price paid, though slowly,
Graeco-Rome and the Gospel kissed, logos made bow
To Revelation, and cult and culture melded.
Thus mind slipped nature and built (rebuilt after Rome’s
Demise) the feldspar and gilded
Empery of reason, that many-roomed Fortress
Faith, with its flung demesnes, which once-and-while shillied
If mind, thralled by theories, went mad for perfection,
Seized human woe and remedied
It senseless. How daft that atheists are abstracts!
Faith, though, forgets not that mind on a leash, loosely
Or no, is dibbled in matter, not brain but stringed
To brain, which underpins doucely
Mind’s peregrinations. Mechanics of the arm
And leg, and brain’s fizzy electrics, are conduits
Of four-square Aquinas, glitz Michaelangelo,
As well the labourers’ junkets
At harvest home. How sooth then was great Gregory –
“Do what you are doing” – viz. fulfil the moment,
Do it well and in charity. And Benedict,
Encaved, having fled Rome’s torment,
Dignified work with his Regula Magistri:
Monks were to build and till with grub hands – labora
Was prayer searching its counterpoint in quiet minds:
Ah, thanks and aves, Madonna,
That, centuries-long, the Cross and Rule commissioned
A continent’s fact, proposing stability
And Godward manners, that zeal, sweat, rest – the three eights –
Might embody a quiddity.
Fractured, all fractured! The marble pillars tarnished,
The roofs botched and leaking, the pediments crumbling;
The Capitol is anted by which-way flowings
Of self-slaved helots, blathering
Of I.D., new trainers and mega-meals - Nietzsche’s
"Last Men!" No wonder, if by few, the littoral
Life is envied, regardless of risks, toil, scant cash,
And beckons like a ritual –
In Joseph’s month especially, the winter storms
Blown out, the charcoal sea agroan in its mettle,
The year’s purpose upon it: fruiting, rudely forced,
Plunged by the fishermen’s tackle.
====================
© April 2019. Revised May 2025
--------------
(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.
(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.
Apposite then, that meaning’s locus, that Bon which
Enharbours sea workers’ lives, their wave-sunk dyings,
Fruited in a workshop, though dry miles from the sea,
In a province panned by sneerings
(As often with seaboard lands) as backward, inbred
(Doubtless) and infra dig. Yes, and Joseph grunting
At his bench, juggling ripsaw and awl, nails blackened,
Hands torn and infected, risked gouging
Or worse, like some Newlyn tar. Panting beside him,
The Word struggled with rough-planed planks, taking splinters
In His palms. Next roomed, the Pure One, shoulders aching,
Kneaded dough to bake in trenchers.
Bread and sweat, wounds and pain, these are the gross rockbed
Of the Ransom. Thanks to He who mercifully
Willed Salutation, that Jesse’s root should blossom!
For, the Great Price paid, though slowly,
Graeco-Rome and the Gospel kissed, logos made bow
To Revelation, and cult and culture melded.
Thus mind slipped nature and built (rebuilt after Rome’s
Demise) the feldspar and gilded
Empery of reason, that many-roomed Fortress
Faith, with its flung demesnes, which once-and-while shillied
If mind, thralled by theories, went mad for perfection,
Seized human woe and remedied
It senseless. How daft that atheists are abstracts!
Faith, though, forgets not that mind on a leash, loosely
Or no, is dibbled in matter, not brain but stringed
To brain, which underpins doucely
Mind’s peregrinations. Mechanics of the arm
And leg, and brain’s fizzy electrics, are conduits
Of four-square Aquinas, glitz Michaelangelo,
As well the labourers’ junkets
At harvest home. How sooth then was great Gregory –
“Do what you are doing” – viz. fulfil the moment,
Do it well and in charity. And Benedict,
Encaved, having fled Rome’s torment,
Dignified work with his Regula Magistri:
Monks were to build and till with grub hands – labora
Was prayer searching its counterpoint in quiet minds:
Ah, thanks and aves, Madonna,
That, centuries-long, the Cross and Rule commissioned
A continent’s fact, proposing stability
And Godward manners, that zeal, sweat, rest – the three eights –
Might embody a quiddity.
Fractured, all fractured! The marble pillars tarnished,
The roofs botched and leaking, the pediments crumbling;
The Capitol is anted by which-way flowings
Of self-slaved helots, blathering
Of I.D., new trainers and mega-meals - Nietzsche’s
"Last Men!" No wonder, if by few, the littoral
Life is envied, regardless of risks, toil, scant cash,
And beckons like a ritual –
In Joseph’s month especially, the winter storms
Blown out, the charcoal sea agroan in its mettle,
The year’s purpose upon it: fruiting, rudely forced,
Plunged by the fishermen’s tackle.
====================
© April 2019. Revised May 2025
----------------
Notes:
The poem is written in my version of Asclepiadean metre, 2nd mode. It is syllabic: the syllable count is 12, 12, 12, 8. Lines 2 and 4 of each stanza have feminine endings with rhyme or half-rhyme. In the first 3 lines of each stanza there are moveable caesuras between the 4th and 8th syllables. There is one irregular line in stanza 12 with an extra syllable, I forget why I left it like that. And as far as I can see, there are 4 instances when the caesura is as late as the 9th syllable.
Each of the 12 "Months: The Sea" poems makes reference to some of the saints of that month as memorialized in the Catholic Missal, but not the impostor 1970 Missal of Paul VI, rather the pre-1955 Missal which contains the true and complete daily Liturgy of the Church. The two have different Calendars of Saints, with the 1970 Calendar being grossly deformed.
Stanza 2: Black-head gulls are only black headed in spring and summer. Where I live, many are black headed already in March. Momus is the Greek god of mockery.
Stanzas 9 and 24: A couple of references to T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" crept in.
Stanza 9: "lash up": a Cornishism for something thrown together any old-how.
Stanza 11: This, of course, is Nazareth and Galilee.
Stanza 19: Pope St Gregory the Great - a true Pope, unlike the post-Vatican II temporizers we are cursed with.
Stanza 20: This is St Benedict's Rule which had such a profound shaping effect on both religious and lay life in the high centuries of European Christendom. It divided the day into three parts for prayer, work and rest; hence the "three eights" in stanza 21.
Stanza 23: "I.D" = identity documents as a symbol of "security." Nietzsche despised what he saw as the dregs of humanity and their yearning for safety, comfort and consumption.
