I have always enjoyed story poems. In fact one of the first books I ever bought was a collection of story poems when I was in the seventh grade. I was a lousy reader in the seventh grade, and I can’t say that I read all of the poems in the book. I’ll confess I wasn’t quite ready for Keats’ La Belle Dame Sans Merci or Byron’s Childe Herald, but I did read some of the others.
The oldest of all literature is the story poem, really. The epic of Gilgamesh, the story of Job, the Iliad and the Odyssey are a few examples of what I am talking about. Some of the greatest works of literature are story poems: The Inferno, Paradise Lost, The Aeneid and many more. But, in the west, I can’t say that I have seen a lot of poets striving to create a great epic poem for our times. And I have often thought that it is not a poet that produces great poetry, but it is a culture that writes it through the chosen poets of its time. I have my doubts about the greatness of our current western world and doubts about it being able to produce great poetry, let alone a great epic poem. As for America, I don’t think there is a great epic poem for it, even though America has produced some very fine poets.
I have been working on an epic poem for some time. Not epic in the grand sense of a story for a culture. I won’t even pretend to be a Homer or a Virgil (I am prone to delusion, but I’m not that delusional) but epic in the sense that it is a story of an adventure that takes place over a span of years. I have mentioned this poem before in my blog. It is called Peter the Pirate: the Commodore’s Journey and it is becoming a life-long effort to write. It is going to be the world’s longest ballad, I think. I may have to check the Guinness Book of World Records to see. While Peter the Pirate is in ballad form, I interject a song from time to time, that is not in ballad stanza, to break up the monotony. I thought I might share one of these songs here. It is in italics, because it is one of the ways I distinguish songs in the story from the story itself. And this song is a story poem from a story poem.
Going Home
Now I left a maid in London town
Said, ‘I’ll be back, if’n I don’t drown.
It’s a brand new ship and she won’t go down.’
O, I was at sea for many a day
What did she do while I was away?
Did she think of me, o, and did she pray?
Sing Sally, hey, I miss you so,
If I had my way I wouldn’t go!
Some day I’m going home, my dear
Some day I’m going home.
Off Greenland’s coast we found a whale.
We hauled her in and we then set sail.
But it did no good for the wind did fail.
And after weeks, when we found our wind—
‘Twas a nasty gale, that the wind did send.
It tore the sails, which we had to mend.
Sing Sally, hey, I miss you so,
If I had my way I wouldn’t go!
Some day I’m going home, my dear
Some day I’m going home.
When we came to the coast of Ireland,
We were attacked by a pirate band!
And they drove our ship into the sand.
And since we lost near half our crew.
It took some time to fix our ship anew.
And a single mast would have to do.
Sing Sally, hey, I miss you so,
If I had my way I wouldn’t go!
Some day I’m going home, my dear
Some day I’m going home.
And then with Cornwall’s coast in sight,
‘Twas hard to see for it was night,
And we wrecked for want of lighthouse light.
And so the new ship did go down.
Captain, crew, and I did drown.
Nay, we never came to London town.
Sing Sally, hey, I miss you so,
If I had my way I wouldn’t go!
Some day I’m going home, my dear
Some day I’m going home.
Some day I'm going home.
I realize that some people do not care for the implausibility of a speaker who tells his story from beyond the grave: “How can Moses write about his own death” so to speak. But sea-shanties, such as this, allow for such a thing, I think. And in the context of the story of the Commodore’s journey, the song is sung to a ghost, so why not have a poem by a ghost?
