Ocean With

The Pacific

No Poet

By Walter Hill

THE few lines from TennysOi (“Poet’s Imagery”) in a PH issue set me thinking arouni this subject. What have the poet had to say about the Pacific? I an thinking of British poets for th moment—because they’re the one I know best—and of the mor prominent of them.

In quest of references I leafe; through no less than eight of th anthologies on my bookshelves. Th fault may lie in my selection, or ii the fact that of recent years haven’t had a lot of time to reaj poetry, so that I’m not as familia as I used to be with the content of my own books. At all event; the references were few indeed.

So I turned to the Oxfor Dictionary of Quotations to see wha quotable bits have survived to fin mention in that august work. I seems that the ocean itself gets onl one mention—Keats, “On Firs Looking Into Chapman’s Homer”- Or like stout Cortes when with eagi eyes He stared at the Pacific — I browsed around among t h likely headings to see what passim reference there might be to th biggest ocean in the world, and aj I could find was this from Rudyar Kipling: “The English Flag”.

Never was isle so little, never wc c sea so lone.

But over the scud and the palm trees an English flag was fltfwnx Let’s get back, then, to th anthologies. One expects this soi of thing of Kipling. Especially ii some of his longer poems he loves to roam far and wide over the seves seas. We think, perhaps, of Tit Song of the Banjo, The Native Bom, M’Andrew’s Hymn, and Tit Mary Gloster. In all of them yoc get the general idea; but in nomi so far as I could see, do you fee; that you are right at home in thl Pacific. It’s a little different in Tit Lost Legion, with the lines: And some of us drift to Sarawak And some of us drift up the Fly.: But the most direct reference could find in Kipling was one thai has stuck in my mind since we “dicb the poem Sussex at school — So one shall Baltic pines content As one some Surrey glade, Or one the palm-grove’s drones lament Before Levuka’s trade. . .

I tried to find out whether [pling actually visited Fiji—or any her of the Islands for that matter but without success. My encyclo dias said a lot about his poetry id prose, but little about his ivels. I did find evidence of his jit to New Zealand and Australia, id you can see that finely re nted in the two verses of The owers, which deal respectively th those two countries. For that atter, if it was prose we were inking of, he writes of these jits, I believe, in Something Of yself; but that’s one of Kipling’s at I haven’t been able to lay nds on here.

Did the former Poet Laureate, ibert Bridges, ever visit the icific? At any rate, in the one ference he makes to it that I have me across, he is cautious enough »t to fall into the errors that ,ve been criticised in R. M. illantyne and others. I’m thinking A Passer-By. Bridges is watching white-sailed ship leaving the ores of England and imagines her stination:

Ah! soon, when Winter has all our vales opprest, When skies are cold and misty, and hail is hurling, Wilt thou glide on the blue Pacific, or rest In a summer haven asleep, thy white sails furling.

Then Rupert Brooke was in the to IMS,Jrat I “nk of y Sni he learued There ot peZps I’ve been readtog the ,h at this great Pacific region has had scant attentlon from the Bntlsh poets. t Work on the first San Francisco- Honolulu ocean telephone cable laying job, by the British cable ships Monarch and Ocean Layer, was completed m mid-September.

Two cables with special amplifiers inserted every 38 miles were laid depth wls ’sf miles Greatest