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.)

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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.”

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© 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.

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© 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.

At the Airport

A "rite of passage" poem with all the rites included or at least alluded to. Hence in stanza seven the three "atches" are the famed three staples of The Times' personal columns - hatches, matches and dispatches. In the sixth stanza "Bartlemy's Fair" is London's once famous, indeed notorious, St Bartholomew's Fair.

   This is possibly the most complex stanza form I've ever used - I am not in a hurry to repeat it! The poem is syllabic and the line syllable counts can be analysed easily. In each stanza lines 3, 6, 7, 10 have feminine endings, all other lines have single syllable masculine endings. Further, lines 2 and 4 rhyme, lines 6 and 7 rhyme, and lines 9 and 11 rhyme.
   Way back in August 1981 I wrote, some time after the event, "A Tardy Epithalamium" to celebrate a friend's wedding. Unfortunately the marriage eventually foundered so I have removed the names from the poem. It is written in syllabics using a simple alcaic form. I posted it on 27 May 2013; it is linked here.

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Turned seventy, how life’s late-realized truths flock
Like airport-domiciled birds –
Wagtails, perhaps, or starlings – crotchetly ganging
At dusk, their static like words,
Mistrustingly, snappishly, clumping close, though sharp
To protect space, each one hunched to endure night’s draining
Of warmth and contexture, that relational faining
Sans which right judgement or instinct fail
And all meaning’s nil.
Man, though, can ideate both abstracts and concepts,
And truth’s in that skill.

Truth it is that an airport’s noised swirl is a type
Of man’s life: birthed, he’s at once
Found dazed at the terminal – that much-ways meaninged
Word for all sorts and the nonce:
A quo – as in law’s terminer or pedants’ glee
In terminology; or a spry termor clinching
Land for a term, even life. And eyes up, see inching
The terminator, parting what’s light
From night on the moon’s
Disc, tugged by Terminus, boundaries’ glared godling
Harsh-mouthing his runes

From his bust on its terminal. Then there’s ad quem
(For all things end): think of words,
Their back-end parts inflected in termination;
Then diseases, fever’s curds,
And policies, periods, all railways and roads,
Sooner, later, must terminate. What’s terrifying,
Though, is terminism – that fiat nullifying
Our headstrong dither at Heaven’s gates,
For contrition’s time
Is curt: missed, the Lord no longer wills our suasion;
We drown in screamed mime.

So, seize the hour! Teach straplings clear-eyed trust of self,
Sinewed by the Canon’s bans,
That, shipshape, the flight desk’s check-in’s voyaged trimly,
The boarding pass’s “you cans/
You can’ts” – life’s bounds already tautened by that slip! –
Stowed safely for pettifogs’ later sharp-nosed query.
Obliged to sunder hold luggage – the rattling weary
Belt claptraps it away – what’s left is
Predicate: tuned thought,
Heed for facts, context’d by the felt Unseen’s rescript,
“Do always the ought.”

Next loom the prim probings of the hand luggage check:
The rebelled mulishness of
Slapping one’s trousered metals into a barren
Customs tray, the all’s-lost cough
That, to parents’ wryness, the hand-swept scanner pings
A first (secret!) crush’s bangle, pocketed slyly
From the polluting world. Thus, teened hot faces scryly
Learn that “ought’s” frankful ownings have cost,
Though righteous to pay:
Thank Something when customs malarkey’s concluded
And you go your way!

Audenic Apophthegms

These little pieces all use the tanka form. To be clear, these are my thoughts, not Auden's, deriving from rereading Humphrey Carpenter's biography and picking up on certain themes. Sometimes I use some of Auden's or Carpenter's words (I think). In the first stanza of "In a Nutshell," "NYT" is the New York Times: replace with the Guardian if you wish!

   On 7 June 2017 I posted a short series called "Epigrams." I was hoping to write more but decided I wasn't very good at them. You can read the series here.

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(After rereading “W. H. Auden, A Biography” by Humphrey Carpenter)

Faith without dogma
Is soda water sans gas;
Vague uplift, stale buns.
All should be pleasant, but who,
Come shove, will die for the Lord?

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“Intensity of
Attention:” hushed at his desk,
Daily the poet
Or statesman strive: but what if
The tyrant likewise? Watch out!

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“Spain” was prescriptive
Nonsense: poetry does not
Insist what to do;
Though by quizzing good and bad
It lauds virtue, which then prompts.

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Inner order, not
Outward look, was key; therefore
Scruff clothes, hair – so what?
But late life, his inner self
Froze: now parody, he died.

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John Pudney made note:
The Thirties Auden, Britten,
Lived in a world which
“Closed certain doors to strangers:”
Oh, would that were still the case!

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Men kill, cheat, rape, fight:
That’s accident not essence
Claim some. No, man fell,
Evil’s the fruit: he’ll fester
Till he say, “Maranatha.”

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In a Nutshell

There are three stages
(Thus Kierkegaard): aesthetic –
Swoon, my precious words!
Ethical – NYT types
Rainbow dress their only child;

Religious – those two
Having failed. Hopeless, helpless,
Man must leap: if not,
Despair will kill; guilt-engulfed,
Reason falls: faith must suffice.

Surrendered thus, man
Chooses himself (indeed yes!)
Oned with the Fontal
Of self – true autonomy
That’s fulfilled in dependence.

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That sneaked slice of cake,
That thug flitching his crime-mate,
The jobsworth quibbling:
All by their nay-deeds illume
The Way, the strait gate they’ll miss.

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