Four-Line Poems, Part Five: "The Lovely In Life Is The Familiar"

I try my best to avoid the news of the world.  But this past week the word "Cyprus" has been insinuating itself into my consciousness.  It seems that something is happening there which ought to concern me.

I have never been to Cyprus.  I'm certain that it is a lovely land, and that the Cypriots are lovely people.  There it sits, a sun-bathed jewel in the blue Mediterranean, just offshore from the fabled lands that Herodotus wrote of long ago:  Phoenicia, Cilicia, Pamphylia, Lycia.

However, I confess that I cannot muster any concern for the liquidity of Cyprus.  For as long as I can remember (five-odd decades), I've been hearing that the world is on the verge of economic calamity.  But, as far as I can tell, economic history boils down to this:  "It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye."

I know next to nothing about how to live.  I cannot claim to have gained any wisdom during my time on Earth.  But I have a sense that life is not as complicated as we make it out to be.

Roland Vivian Pitchforth, "Cottage, Bainbridge" (1928)

                                   Night

That shining moon -- watched by that one faint star:
Sure now am I, beyond the fear of change,
The lovely in life is the familiar,
And only the lovelier for continuing strange.

Walter de la Mare, Memory and Other Poems (1938).

Roland Vivian Pitchforth, "Hebden, Yorkshire"

Of course, our appreciation of the lovely familiars in life may be enhanced if we bear certain things in mind.

               Waiting

          'Waiting to . . .'
          'Who is?'
          'We are . . .
     Was that the night-owl's cry?'
'I heard not.  But see!  the evening star;
And listen! -- the ocean's solacing sigh.'
'You mean the surf at the harbour bar?'
          'What did you say?'
          'Oh, "waiting".'
          '"Waiting? " --
          Waiting what for?'
               'To die.'

Walter de la Mare, Ibid.

The reference to the sound of "the surf at the harbour bar" in line 7 brings to mind two other poems that have death as their subject:  Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar" ("may there be no moaning of the bar") and Charles Kingsley's "The Three Fishers" ("though the harbour bar be moaning").

Roland Vivian Pitchforth, "Bainbridge" (1928)

"Crossing The Bar"

Charles Kingsley's "The Three Fishers" (which appeared in my previous post) revolves around the image (and sound) of the "moaning" of "the harbour bar."  According to Christopher Ricks, who has edited Alfred Tennyson's poetry, Tennyson owned a copy of Kingsley's Andromeda and Other Poems (1858), in which "The Three Fishers" appeared.  Christopher Ricks (editor), Tennyson: A Selected Edition (1989), page 665.  Further, Tennyson's wife Emily noted in her journal that he read some of Kingsley's poems to her in 1858.  Ibid.

Tennyson wrote "Crossing the Bar" in October of 1889 when crossing the Solent to the Isle of Wight.  Although the poem was prompted by that journey, Kingsley's "Though the harbour bar be moaning" may have been hovering somewhere in the back of his mind as well.

              Christopher Nevinson (1889-1946), "Silver Estuary" (c. 1925)

            Crossing the Bar

Sunset and evening star,
     And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
     When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
     Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
     Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
     And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
     When I embark;

For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
     The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
     When I have crost the bar.

Alfred Tennyson, Demeter and Other Poems (1889).

Commentators on the poem usually link "bourne" in line 13 to Hamlet's description of death as "the undiscovered country from whose bourn/No traveller returns."  Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene i, 79-80. Coincidentally, Christina Rossetti wrote a poem titled "The Bourne," which I have previously posted here.  The poem was published in 1866, but I am not suggesting that it influenced Tennyson, merely noting another use of the word in Victorian poetry.

Commentators also suggest that "face to face" in line 15 may be an allusion to 1 Corinthians 13.12:  "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face."

                                  Christopher Nevinson, "Saint-Malo"

"Three Fishers Went Sailing Away To The West . . ."

The best-known poem about "fisher-folk" in the Victorian era was probably "The Three Fishers" by Charles Kingsley.  This is most likely due to the fact that it was set to music soon after it was published, and became a popular song.  Versions of it are still sung today.

                                 Richard Eurich, "Fawley Beach" (1939)

                    The Three Fishers

Three fishers went sailing away to the West,
     Away to the West as the sun went down;
Each thought on the woman who loved him the best,
     And the children stood watching them out of the town;
     For men must work, and women must weep,
     And there's little to earn, and many to keep,
               Though the harbour bar be moaning.

Three wives sat up in the lighthouse tower,
     And they trimmed the lamps as the sun went down;
They looked at the squall, and they looked at the shower,
     And the night-rack came rolling up ragged and brown.
     But men must work, and women must weep,
     Though storms be sudden, and waters deep,
               And the harbour bar be moaning.

Three corpses lay out on the shining sands
     In the morning gleam as the tide went down,
And the women are weeping and wringing their hands
     For those who will never come home to the town;
     For men must work, and women must weep,
     And the sooner it's over, the sooner to sleep;
               And good-bye to the bar and its moaning.

Charles Kingsley, Andromeda and Other Poems (1858).

                                         Seattle Fishermen's Memorial

The "moaning" of "the harbour bar" is explained by Kingsley Amis in a note to the poem:

"The late Philip Hope-Wallace told me that, in the common estuary of the rivers Taw and Torridge in Barnstaple (or Bideford) Bay, the joining of their waters and the incoming sea can between them, if conditions are just right, produce a loud moaning sound above the sand-bar at the mouth of the inlet.  Kingsley had lived in that part of north Devon and was no doubt referring to a local superstition."

Kingsley Amis, The Amis Anthology: A Personal Choice of English Verse (Hutchinson 1988), pages 328-329.  The "superstition" of which Amis writes is the belief that, if the bar is moaning, it is betokening the coming death of those who cross it.

                                            Photograph by J. Clark

Lest we think that the poems that I have recently posted by Charles Kingsley, Christina Rossetti, Arthur Symons, and Ernest Dowson are quaint relics of a by-gone era, I have included images of the Seattle Fishermen's Memorial with this post.

The Memorial is located at the Fishermen's Terminal, which is about two miles from where I live.  Flowers may usually be found at the Memorial, together with personal items that have been left by the family and friends of those whose names appear on the engraved plaques that are to the left and right of the statue.

                                  Metal sculpture at the base of the statue