Canto VII – Westward

“His thought is not for harp nor taking of rings –

Nor happiness in wife nor joy in worldly things –

Nor for aught else, save the surging waves;

But ever does he yearn who seeks the sea.”

-        The Seafarer

The salmon ran like crusted tapers –

a fleshy armada – massing

on the borders of the oak ensemble

to launch and flame the Torridge

In their efforts to glimpse a brick

of the pale town on the water juncture –

where they furnished seven ships to char

the Spanish and endowed paunchy Brittania

with commerce and colonies and three

snapped necks at Heavitree. A hare’s eye,

cannot distinguish between once, now,

or soon to be, yet dwelled long and often

upon the writ and preaching of Charles Kingsley –

who rears quietly upon the quay, marbled

and balding and grey, whilst nearby,

Rose Salterne drinks and drowns herself

for another day.

To the north, lies a submerged forest;

eight-dozen severed trunks, salt-smoked

into black stubs, now freshly swept into

a shore – here is where Kinglsey first dug

his heels and devised fleets and fame –

a port for the common mariner to seek

foreign riches and domestic acclaim.

He loved this slice of shingle and sand,

and slipped and clattered up the pebbled ridge

with quarrymen in tow, to strain and lift every boulder,

and examine the fauna pocketed below –

no skater nor sea-pie escaped his admiring gaze

and yet an emptied idyll never pays;

Kingsley discarded a friend and lost a muse

when they stacked a village in his name;

we must ask would he still write, if he could know,

that he would carve a new Westward Ho?

Perhaps there would be nowhere for Kipling

to go – and the world would be starved

of the antics and capers of Stalky and co –

fleeing the torment of Lorne Lodge,

Kipling came to drill and conjugate

and mime the imperial motions

upon the ocean’s edge – yet more

important than those stale notions

were the author’s own violent emotions

when upon the sound, he spied a blossom

he could not forget and from that light

spun and wove a literary debt.

There is much to be won and witnessed

when stationed by the sea;

it is here that the hares often forget

their orbit and feign for a moment,

or a century, that they are sprinting

once more wild – once more free.

Back to top