And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.
I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.
Sea Fever
By John Masefield
In 1930, on the death of the Poet Laureate Robert Bridges, many felt that Rudyard Kipling was a likely choice for a successor. Kipling, the poet and storyteller of the British Empire, reputedly turned down this offer. However, a suitable replacement was found, and upon the recommendation of Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, King George V appointed John Masefield as the new Poet Laureate, who remained in this honorary position until his death in 1967. As Kipling said:
Transportation is civilisation!As it had also been for many others, including Joseph Conrad, it was a life "at sea" that had offered Masefield an escape from an unhappy situation to a "world" of possibilities (See > Globalisation - before the word - and now! on this blog).
In 1891, aged 13, he left an unhappy education as a boarder at the King's School in Warwick, to board HMS Conway, both to train for a life at sea, and to break his addiction to reading. This addiction was to continue for the rest of his life.
He spent several years aboard this ship and found that he could spend much of his time reading and writing. It was aboard the Conway that Masefield's love for story-telling grew. While on the ship, he listened to the stories told about sea lore. He continued to read, and felt that he was to become a writer and story teller himself.
In 1894, Masefield boarded the Gilcruix, destined for Chile – this first voyage bringing him the experience of sea sickness. He recorded his experiences while sailing through the extreme weather, his journal entries reflecting a delight in seeing flying fish, porpoises, and birds, and was awed by the beauty of nature, including a rare sighting of a nocturnal rainbow on his voyage. On reaching Chile, Masefield suffered from sunstroke and was hospitalised. He eventually returned home to England as a passenger aboard a steam ship. In 1895, Masefield returned to sea on a windjammer destined for New York City. However, the urge to become a writer and the hopelessness of life as a sailor overtook him, and in New York he jumped ship. He lived as a vagrant for several months, drifting between odd jobs, eventually finding work as an assistant to a bar keeper, before finally returning to New York City.
"I had never (till that time) cared very much for poetry, but your poem impressed me deeply, and set me on fire. Since then poetry has been the one deep influence in my life, and to my love of poetry I owe all my friends, and the position I now hold."
Duncan Campbell Scott CMG (1862 – 1947) was a Canadian poet who was also a bureaucrat in the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs where he is known for his work as the deputy superintendent of the Department of Indian Affairs from 1913 to 1932; he was a staunch supporter of the assimilation and of Indigenous people.
"As Deputy Superintendent, Scott oversaw the assimilationist Indian Residential School system for Aboriginal children, stating his goal was 'to get rid of the Indian problem'"During the 19th and 20th centuries, the Canadian government began a campaign to forcibly assimilate Aboriginals. The government consolidated power over Aboriginal land through treaties and the use of force, eventually isolating indigenous people to reserves. Marriage practices and spiritual ceremonies were banned, and spiritual leaders were imprisoned. Additionally, the Canadian government instituted an extensive residential school system to assimilate children. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada concluded that this effort was violent enough to amount to cultural genocide. The schools actively worked to alienate children from their cultural roots. Students were prohibited from speaking their native languages, were regularly abused, and were arranged marriages by the government after their graduation. The explicit goal of the Canadian government was to completely assimilate the Aboriginals into European culture and destroy all traces of their native history.
This policy of cultural genocide was echoed in the "Taking of the Children" and the lost generations of Australian indigenous peoples (See Black Legends? Join the Culture Wars)
In its 2015 report, Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission said that the Indian Residential School system amounted to cultural genocide.
However, Scott, as a poet, was, according to Masefield, an inspiration?
For the next two years, Masefield was employed by the huge Alexander Smith carpet factory in Yonkers, New York, where long hours were expected and conditions were far from ideal. He purchased up to 20 books a week, and devoured both modern and classical literature. His interests at this time were diverse and his reading included works by George du Maurier, Dumas, Thomas Browne, Hazlitt, Dickens, Kipling, and R. L. Stevenson. Chaucer also became very important to him during this time, as well as poetry by Keats and Shelley. He eventually returned home to England in 1897 as a passenger aboard a steam ship.
By the time he was 24, Masefield's poems were being published in periodicals and his first collected works, Salt-Water Ballads (1902) was published, the poem "Sea-Fever" appearing in this book.
As a story teller Masefield values:
. . . a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,European exceptionalism is widely reflected in popular genres of literature, especially literature for young adults (for example, Rudyard Kipling's Kim) and adventure literature in general. Portrayal of European colonialism in such literature has been analysed in terms of Eurocentrism in retrospect, such as presenting idealised and often exaggeratedly masculine Western heroes, who conquered 'savage' peoples in the remaining so-called 'dark spaces' of the globe.
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.
Thinly disguised racist narratives were part of the necessary ideological structure to maintain the European colonialist and capitalistic system of exploitation of the peoples of the whole world, but one short story, one novella in particular, creates a sort of cultural collision between truth and fiction, reality and denial. This is Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.
In the 1902 novel Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad has Marlow/Conrad the narrator talking with others on a ship moored on the dark aired River Thames at Gravesend. This river, a river at the heart of the British Empire is the setting from which Marlow begins his reminiscences and then tells his tale.
The author Adam Hochschild deals with the historical background to the Heart of Darkness. The exploitation of the Congo Free State by King Leopold II of Belgium between 1885 and 1908, including the large-scale atrocities committed during that period, are revealed in an exposé of multiple histories conveniently forgotten or suppressed in his bestseller King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998).
In the chapter called "Meeting Mr Kurtz" Hochschild says more about Conrad the man and the writer:
Heart of Darkness is one of the most scathing indictments of imperialism in all literature, but its author, curiously, thought himself an ardent imperialist where England was concerned. Conrad fully recognized Leoplod's rape of the Congo for what it was: "The horror! The horror!" his character Kurtz says on his deathbed. And Conrad's stand-in, Marlow, muses on how "the conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much." yet in almost the same breath, Marlow talks about how the British territories colored red on a world map were "good to see at any time because one knows that some real work is done in there"; British colonialists were "bearers of a spark from the sacred fire."
Marlow was speaking for Conrad , whose love of his adoptive country knew no bounds: Conrad felt that "liberty . . . can only be found under the English flag all over the world." And at the very time he was denouncing the European lust for African riches in his novel, he was an investor in a gold mine near Johannesburg.Pages 146-47
Conrad was a man of his time and place in other ways as well. He was partly a prisoner of what Mark Twain, in a different context, called "the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages." Heart of Darkness has come in for some justified pummeling in recent years because of its portrayal of black characters, who say no more than a few words. In fact, they don't speak at all: they grunt; they chant; they produce a "drone of weird incantations" and "a wild passionate uproar", they spout "strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language . . . like the responses of some satanic litany." The true message of the book, the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe has argued is: "Keep away from Africa, or else! Mr. Kurtz . . . should have heeded that warning and the prowling horror in his heart would have kept its place, chained to its lair. But he foolishly exposed himself to the wild irresistible allure of the jungle al lo! the darkness found him out."
However laden it is with Victorian racism, Heart of Darkness remains the greatest portrait in fiction of Europeans in the Scramble for Africa. When Marlow says goodbye to his aunt before heading to his new job, "she talked about 'weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways,' till, upon my word, she made me quite uncomfortable. I ventured to hint that the Company was run for profit." Conrad's white men go about their rape of the continent in the belief that they are uplifting the natives, bringing civilization, serving "the noble cause."
All these illusions are embodied in the character of Kurtz. He is both a murderous head collector and an intellectual, "an emissary of . . . science and progress." He is a painter, the creator of "a small sketchin oils" of a woman carrying a torch that Marlow finds at the Central Station. And he is a poet and journalist, the author of, among other works, a seventeen-page report - "vibrating with eloquence . . . a beautiful piece of writing" - to the International Society for the Suppression of savage Customs. At the end of this report, filled with lofty sentiments, Kurtz scrawls in a shaky hand: "Exterminate all the brutes!"
Masefield's notion of time, and in particular the time of empires and civilisations, has some resemblance to Kipling's attitude, an attitude that is possible to interpret in positive terms, as anthems for enlightened and duty-bound empire-building, and that captured the mood of the Victorian era.
Kipling's work was also regarded by others as propaganda for brazenfaced imperialism and its attendant racial attitudes; still others saw irony in the poems and warnings of the perils of empire. As, for example in "Recessional", a poem that Kipling composed for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, in 1897.
The poem went against the celebratory mood of the time, providing instead a reminder of the transient nature of British Imperial power. The poem expresses both pride in the British Empire, but also an underlying sadness that the Empire might go the way of all previous empires.
"The title and its allusion to an end rather than a beginning add solemnity and gravitas to Kipling's message.""Recessional" is one of the most famous poems in the English language. It was written for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897, which celebrated the 60th anniversary of her reign. Kipling originally composed "The White Man's Burden" for this event, a work with imperialist overtones. But he, somewhat surprisingly, came to feel that the Jubilee brought out a degree of optimism about Britain's global prospects "that scared me." So pondering deeply the event, the brewing troubles for Britain in South Africa, and the fate of other empires in history, he determined that a poem showing humility would be more fitting of the occasion. Kipling wrote and offered "Recessional" instead.
The poem is five stanzas of six lines each, composed of rhyming couplets. The last couplet – the biblical phrase "Lest we forget" (Deuteronomy 6:12) – repeats at the end of each stanza, reinforcing the message that Kipling intended to convey. The title suggests the departure of the clergy and the choir at the end of a service through the nave of a church. While scholars concur that Kipling was not a particularly religious man, he was very aware of the sacred nature of religious texts and processions in English history. The title and its allusion to an end rather than a beginning add solemnity and gravitas to Kipling's message: the English should be careful of imperialistic hubris, be wary of jingoism, and understand that their earthly conquests pale in comparison with the mighty works of God.
Kipling warns of a time when all of the "pomp of yesterday" fades away. The navies are gone, the "reeking tube and iron shard" have turned to "valiant dust that builds upon dust". These marvels and achievements are meaningless in the face of time. Men should be wary of their pride and their boasting, and should strive instead for a "humble and contrite heart". He cites fallen empires of Nineveh and Tyre as a warning that decline is inevitable.
The work caused a shock and a sensation. Instead of bragging or bombastic, it was humble, thoughtful and moving. The poem was a powerful and necessary countercurrent to the jingoism of the jubilee that had both attracted and troubled Kipling. The term "Lest we forget" became a watchword and thereafter appeared on gravestones all over the country.
In the poem, Kipling argues that boasting and jingoism, faults of which he was often accused, were inappropriate and vain in light of the permanence of God.
The third stanza runs:
Far-called our navies melt away—Similarly, Nineveh and Spain are juxtaposed as empires of the past with the British industrial, maritime and commercial empire in Masefield's famous poem Cargoes, published in Ballads (1903)
On dune and headland sinks the fire—
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
Cargoes
Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.
Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amythysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.
Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.
The arts are, more often than not, embedded in the ideology of the class they serve, not because of some deliberate knowledge based choice, but unconsciously, and struggling, always struggling, to make some kind of sense of the lived experience. Masefield is no exception to this, and neither is Kipling.
George Orwell wrote a long consideration of Kipling's work for Horizon in 1942, noting that although as a "jingo imperialist" Kipling was "morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting", his work had many qualities which ensured that while "every enlightened person has despised him ... nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there". Orwell said:
One reason for Kipling's power [was] his sense of responsibility, which made it possible for him to have a world-view, even though it happened to be a false one. Although he had no direct connexion with any political party, Kipling was a Conservative, a thing that does not exist nowadays. Those who now call themselves Conservatives are either Liberals, Fascists or the accomplices of Fascists. He identified himself with the ruling power and not with the opposition. In a gifted writer this seems to us strange and even disgusting, but it did have the advantage of giving Kipling a certain grip on reality. The ruling power is always faced with the question, 'In such and such circumstances, what would you do?', whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions. Where it is a permanent and pensioned opposition, as in England, the quality of its thought deteriorates accordingly. Moreover, anyone who starts out with a pessimistic, reactionary view of life tends to be justified by events, for Utopia never arrives and 'the gods of the copybook headings', as Kipling himself put it, always return. Kipling sold out to the British governing class, not financially but emotionally. This warped his political judgement, for the British ruling class were not what he imagined, and it led him into abysses of folly and snobbery, but he gained a corresponding advantage from having at least tried to imagine what action and responsibility are like. It is a great thing in his favour that he is not witty, not 'daring', has no wish to épater les bourgeois. He dealt largely in platitudes, and since we live in a world of platitudes, much of what he said sticks. Even his worst follies seem less shallow and less irritating than the 'enlightened' utterances of the same period, such as Wilde's epigrams or the collection of cracker-mottoes at the end of Man and Superman.George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman takes us, in the third act, though often skipped in performance, but also presented as a play in its own right, down to Hell!
— George Orwell
