"Fisher-Folk"

The first stanza of Ernest Dowson's "In a Breton Cemetery," which comments upon the harsh life of Breton "fisher-folk," puts me in mind of a poem by Arthur Symons, Dowson's fellow Nineties poet.  Symons's best-known poems are set in the usual urban Decadent haunts: London, Paris, Venice, et cetera.  But Symons also spent a fair amount of time in out-of-the-way seaside towns in England, Wales, and Ireland, and these places find their way into a number of his poems.  (With the requisite twilit, grey-tinted melancholia and world-weariness of the Decadents still intact, of course.)

                            Richard Eurich, "In Falmouth Harbour" (1935)

          The Fisher's Widow

The boats go out and the boats come in
Under the wintry sky;
And the rain and foam are white in the wind,
And the white gulls cry.

She sees the sea when the wind is wild
Swept by the windy rain;
And her heart's a-weary of sea and land
As the long days wane.

She sees the torn sails fly in the foam,
Broad on the skyline grey;
And the boats go out and the boats come in,
But there's one away.

Arthur Symons, Days and Nights (1889).

                                        Richard Eurich, "P.Z. 576" (1974)

I like the recurrence of "the boats go out and the boats come in":  as with the movement of the tide.  The alliteration throughout the poem seems to embody the sound and the motion of the sea as well:  "wintry sky;/ . . . white in the wind,/And the white gulls cry."  And:  "She sees the sea when the wind is wild/Swept by the windy rain."  

I wonder about line 8: "As the long days wane."  The source would seem to be Tennyson's well-known lines in "Ulysses":  "The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep/Moans round with many voices."  Symons, like most Victorian poets, was brought up on Tennyson's verse.  Was this a conscious or an unconscious borrowing?  I suspect that it was done in homage to Tennyson, but that is just a guess.

                                   Richard Eurich, "Dorset Cove" (1939)