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 singe

a beard 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 still rears upon the quay, marbled and grey,

whilst nearby, Rose Salterne drinks

and drowns another day.

To the north, breathes an underground forest;

eight-dozen severed trunks, salt-smoked

into black stubs, now swept and shaven into

a shore – here is where Kinglsey first dug in

his heels and devised fleets and fame –

a port for the common mariner to seek

adventure, or murder,

or a name. He loved this slip

of shingle and sand, and tripped

and clattered up its pebbled ridge

with quarrymen in tow, to topple every boulder,

and examine the fauna pocketed below –

no skater nor sea-pie escaped his gaze

and yet, an empty idyll never pays;

Kingsley discarded a friend and lost a muse

when they stacked a village in his image;

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

that his words would carve a new Westward Ho?

There would be nowhere for Kipling to go –

and the world would be starved

of the capers of Stalky and co.

He fled the torments of Lorne Lodge,

and came to drill and conjugate

and mime those Imperial motions

against the ocean’s edge – yet more

pressing still than those stale notions

is the burden of a pen’s passion –

when upon the sound, he spied a blossom

he could not forget, and from that light

spun and wove and swooned

into 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 that they are sprinting

once more wild – once more free –

for a sweet moment,

or a sweeter century.

Back to top