Tristan da Cunha
Snore in the foam; the night is vast and blind;
The blanket of the mist about your shoulders,
Sleep your old sleep of rock, snore in the wind,
Snore in the spray! the storm your slumber lulls,
His wings are folded on your nest of boulders,
As on their eggs the grey wings of gulls.
No more as when, so dark an age ago,
You hissed a giant cinder from the ocean,
Around your rocks you furl the shawling snow
Half sunk in your own darkness, vast and grim,
And round you on the deep with surly motion
Pivot your league-long shadow as you swim.
Why should you haunt me thus but that I know
My surly heart is in your own displayed,
Round whom such leagues in endless circuit flow,
Whose hours in such a gloomy compass run—
A dial with its league-long arm of shade
Slowly revolving to the moon and sun.
My pride has sunk, like your grey fissured crags,
By its own strength o’ertoppled and betrayed:
I, too, have burned the wind with fiery flags
Who now am but a roost for empty words,
An island of the sea whose only trade
Is in the voyage of its wandering birds.
Did you not, when your strength became your pyre,
Deposed and tumbled from your flaming tower,
Awake in gloom from whence you sank in fire,
To find, Antaeus-like, more vastly grown,
A throne in your own darkness, and a power
Sheathed in the very coldness of your stone?
Your strength is that you have no hope or fear,
You march before the world without a crown,
The nations call you back, you do not hear,
The cities of the earth grow grey behind you,
You will be there when your great flames go down
And still the morning in the van will find you.
You march before the continents, you scout
In front of all the earth; alone you scale
The mast-head of the world, a lorn look-out,
Waving the snowy flutter of your spray
And gazing back in infinite farewell
To suns that sink and shores that fade away.
From your grey tower what long regrets you fling
To where, along the low horizon burning,
The great swan-breasted seraphs soar and sing,
And suns go down, and trailing splendours dwindle,
And sails on lonely errands unreturning
Glow with a gold no sunrise can rekindle.
Turn to the night: these flames are not for you
Whose steeple for the thunder swings its bells;
Grey Memnon, to the tempest only true,
Turn to the night, turn to the shadowy foam,
And let your voice, the saddest of farewells,
With sullen curfew toll the grey wings home.
The wind, your mournful siren, haunts the gloom;
The rocks, spray-clouded, are your signal guns
Whose stony nitre, puffed with flying spume,
Rolls forth in grim salute your broadside hollow
Over the gorgeous burial of suns
To sound the tocsin of the storms that follow.
Plunge forward like a ship to battle hurled,
Slip the long cables of the failing light,
The level rays that moor you to the world:
Sheathed in your armour of eternal frost,
Plunge forward, in the thunder of the fight
To lose yourself as I would fain be lost.
Exiled like you and severed from my race
By the cold ocean of my own disdain,
Do I not freeze in such a wintry space,
Do I not travel through a storm as vast
And rise at times, victorious from the main,
To fly the sunrise at my shattered mast?
Your path is but a desert where you reap
Only the bitter knowledge of your soul:
You fish with nets of seaweed in the deep
As fruitlessly as I with nets of rhyme—
Yet forth you stride, yourself the way, the goal,
The surges are your strides, your path is time.
Hurled by what aim to what tremendous range!
A missile from that great sling of the past,
Your passage leaves its track of death and change
And ruin on the world: you fly beyond
Leaping the current of the ages vast
As lightly as a pebble skims a pond.
The years are undulations in your flight
Whose awful motion we can only guess—
Too swift for sense, too terrible for sight,
We only know how fast behind you darken
Our days like lonely beacons of distress:
We know that you stride on and will not hearken.
Now in the eastern sky the fairest planet
Pierces the dying wave with dangled spear,
And in the whirring hollows of your granite
That vaster sea to which you are a shell
Sighs with a ghostly rumour, like the drear
Moan of the night wind in a fallen cell.
We shall not meet again; over the wave
Our ways divide, and yours is straight and endless,
But mine is short and crooked to the grave:
But what of those dark crowds amid whose flow
I battle like a rock, aloof and friendless,
Are not their generations vague and endless
The waves, the strides, the feet on which I go?
A number of years ago I wrote an article about Roy Campbell’s poetry in a small journal created by myself and some friends which I highly doubt can be found anywhere on the internet now. Besides highlighting the quality of Campbell’s poetry I therein sought to understand why he has largely been forgotten when he was once praised by such poetic giants as T.S. Eliot. I had no real answer. I speculated that it might have been due to his largely self-imposed status as a persona non grata among the cultural establishment in England, his lamentable support for Franco’s regime during the Spanish Civil War, the formalistic nature of his verse or simply because as a colonial he remained something of an outsider among the aristocratic literati.
All of these are probably contributing factors but now that I reflect on it today I can’t help but feel that perhaps the simplest and best reason was one that I then didn’t consider. Could it be that we just haven’t really understood him well enough? I really am convinced that he penned poems of lasting quality and that he very underservedly goes unread today.
The following poem was written in the middle of what I suppose can be called a nervous breakdown while the poet was back in South Africa, whither he returned after the success of his first collection, The Flaming Terrapin. He went back to his country as something of a literary celebrity in order to lecture and edit a cultural journal but found life there to be extremely stifling and isolated. I hope that is enough of a backdrop for reading this poem.
Form
Seventeen sestets in rhymed iambic pentameter.
Analysis
Without having read this somewhere before, the poem seems to be inspired by Tristan Corbière’s Au vieux Roscoff (http://www.unjourunpoeme.fr/poeme/au-vieux-roscoff). Corbière’s poem addresses the seaside town in Brittany called Roscoff, once the home of corsaires and pirates that preyed on English sailors. What he wants to evoke in his poem is Roscoffs stalwart defiance, its ruggedness and its fierce solitude. All of this is taken aboard by Campbell in his counterpart, Tristan da Cunha, a remote volcanic island in the middle of the South Atlantic. For readers of both French and English, you may compare the following two stanzas. Their similitude can hardly be a coincidence:
Ronfle à la mer, ronfle à la brise ;
Ta corne dans la brume grise,
Ton pied marin dans les brisans…
– Dors : tu peux fermer ton œil borgne
Ouvert sur le large, et qui lorgne
Les Anglais, depuis trois cents ans.Snore in the foam; the night is vast and blind;
The blanket of the mist about your shoulders,
Sleep your old sleep of rock, snore in the wind,
Snore in the spray! the storm your slumber lulls,
His wings are folded on your nest of boulders,
As on their eggs the grey wings of gulls.
But whereas Corbière’s poem doesn’t really go further than this, Campbell’s poem becomes a profoundly personal one. The first two stanzas invoke Tristan da Cunha’s dormant ferocity, its stoic solitude and isolation–much like Corbière’s. In the succeeding stanzas, however, these become the poet’s own:
My pride has sunk, like your grey fissured crags,
By its own strength o’ertoppled and betrayed:
I, too, have burned the wind with fiery flags
Who now am but a roost for empty words,
An island of the sea whose only trade
Is in the voyages of its wandering birds.
In its isolation the island is content to haughtily shoulder the world on its own terms, it has proudly rejected the world around it:
Your strength is that you have no hope or fear,
You march before the world without a crown,
The nations call you back, you do not hear,
The cities of the earth grow grey behind you,
You will be there when your great flames go down
And still the morning in the van will find you.
But the poet’s ‘s own sequestration from the world is treated with far more trepidation:
Exiled like you and severed from my race
By the cold ocean of my own disdain,
Do I not freeze in such a wintry space,
Do I not travel through a storm as vast
And rise at times, victorious from the main,
To fly the sunrise at my shattered mast?
Where the poet initially identifies with the island’s solitude, however, he later sees something inimical in it, and his puniness before its power:
The years are undulations in your flight
Whose awful motion we can only guess—
Too swift for sense, too terrible for sight,
We only know how fast behind you darken
Our days like lonely beacons of distress:
We know that you stride on and will not hearken.
At the end of the poem, the poet takes leave of the island. Although he has found a symbol of his own remoteness from the world in it, he makes it clear that Tristan da Cunha is no companion:
Our ways divide, and yours is straight and endless,
But mine is short and crooked to the grave:
But what of those dark crowds amid whose flow
I battle like a rock, aloof and friendless,
Are not their generations vague and endless
The waves, the strides, the feet on which I go?