Mea Culpa

I apologize; I was busy yesterday and the day before and so did not post any poetry, and the Sunday before I was absent. Therefore, I am now going to post a poem that deeply ensnares my fascination. A quirk about my mind is that I am strongly attracted by shipwrecks, the stories, causes of, precautions taken against, etc. The one I read about first was not, as you may suppose, the ever-classic Titanic, but the Lusitania, in memory of which this poem was written. It would seem that before the Lusitania's last voyage in 1915, in the midst of WWII, the Germans published newspaper articles warning citizens to boycott the vessel. The warnings went unheeded, and that spring Lusitania set out with 3000 passengers, 1198 of which never returned. A Nazi submarine sunk the ship on May 7th, in only forty-five minutes. America's first explosion of indignation was summed up in Joyce Kilmer's passionate poem:

The White Ships and the Red

(For Alden March)

With drooping sail and pennant
That never a wind may reach,
They float in sunless waters
Beside a sunless beach.
Their mighty masts and funnels
Are white as driven snow,
And with a pallid radiance
Their ghostly bulwarks glow.

Here is a Spanish galleon
That once with gold was gay,
Here is a Roman trireme
Whose hues outshone the day.
But Tyrian dyes have faded,
And prows that once were bright
With rainbow stains wear only
Death's livid, dreadful white.

White as the ice that clove her
That unforgotten day,
Among her pallid sisters
The grim Titanic lay.
And through the leagues above her
She looked aghast, and said:
"What is this living ship that comes
Where every ship is dead?"

The ghostly vessels trembled
From ruined stern to prow;
What was this thing of terror
That broke their vigil now?
Down through the startled ocean
A mighty vessel came,
Not white, as all dead ships must be,
But red, like living flame!

The pale green waves about her
Were swiftly, strangely dyed,
By the great scarlet stream that flowed
From out her wounded side.
And all her decks were scarlet
And all her shattered crew.
She sank among the white ghost ships
And stained them through and through.

The grim Titanic greeted her
"And who art thou?" she said;
"Why dost thou join our ghostly fleet
Arrayed in living red?
We are the ships of sorrow
Who spend the weary night,
Until the dawn of Judgment Day,
Obscure and still and white."

"Nay," said the scarlet visitor,
"Though I sink through the sea,
A ruined thing that was a ship,
I sink not as did ye.
For ye met with your destiny
By storm or rock or fight,
So through the lagging centuries
Ye wear your robes of white.

"But never crashing iceberg
Nor honest shot of foe,
Nor hidden reef has sent me
The way that I must go.
My wound that stains the waters,
My blood that is like flame,
Bear witness to a loathly deed,
A deed without a name.

"I went not forth to battle,
I carried friendly men,
The children played about my decks,
The women sang -- and then --
And then -- the sun blushed scarlet
And Heaven hid its face,
The world that God created
Became a shameful place!

"My wrong cries out for vengeance,
The blow that sent me here
Was aimed in Hell. My dying scream
Has reached Jehovah's ear.
Not all the seven oceans
Shall wash away that stain;
Upon a brow that wears a crown
I am the brand of Cain."

When God's great voice assembles
The fleet on Judgment Day,
The ghosts of ruined ships will rise
In sea and strait and bay.
Though they have lain for ages
Beneath the changeless flood,
They shall be white as silver,
But one -- shall be like blood.

Sensations under a Staircase

A few days ago, I walked into a spacious new library with Margaret, the tantalizing prospect of a bit of quiet reading dominating my mind.

After seeing Margaret off with her Latin tutor, I settled in a warm, shadowed nook wedged between a large staircase (the principal one of that building) and a convenient wall. Dropping into a plush chair, I pulled out Virgil's Aeneid, and fell gently through the pages into Carthage, where Dido cried, implored, and raged in vain, and Aeneas slowly followed an unusually insistent Mercury down to the shore. As Dido opened her mouth to defy Aeneas' immortal parentage, what should reach my ears but the sound of a heavy fall, apparently from several millenniums ahead.

Rather curious, I surfaced from my fantastical daydream, and as Dido's shrieks grew faint, I became aware of a fluent stream of profanity. As the library came back into focus, I glanced upwards, and beheld a passerby prone upon the staircase that rose above me, now angrily uprighting herself and fabricating the colorful phrases that had interrupted me.

Not thinking this of any particular importance, I drifted back to Dido. I shadowed her through her insanity, her countless sacrifices, and her suicide, only to have my attention seized at the crucial moment by labored breathing and a panted, "Good - exercise; keep - it up." Upon examination, there proved to be a ponderous lady ascending the evidently popular and relatively long staircase.

Mildly amused by a double encounter with expressions not meant for my ears, and marveling slightly at the coincidence, I rejoined Dido, only to find that she had died in my absence, and I was now to attend the funeral games of Anchises.

The boat race, my favorite event, came first, and I joined the Nereids in propelling the foremost vessel, Scylla, to victory. As I watched Aeneas dole out the prizes, a strange voice muttered, not far away, "Knees, knees, knees!" My attention was instantaneously reverted to the staircase, from whence I supposed this extraordinary exclamation to issue, and sure enough, there was the speaker, an elderly gentleman nearing the top step. I very much wanted to laugh, but waited until Margaret and I were packed in the car on the way home, as I attempted to relate the tale.