Gordon Kerry

For those in peril on the sea

This work was commissioned by Symphony Australia for Gondwana Voices and the WASO. I began by looking at poetry by John Kinsella, the WA born poet recently described as ‘an Orphic fountain’, much of whose work has the WA coast – and childhood – as its setting. I also began to see the old metaphor of the voyage as a symbol for life as the basis for this piece. Ultimately I chose three of Kinsella’s poems interspersed with poems of Constantin Cavafy, the anonymous author of the Ballad of ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and one of the most powerful scriptural passages, St Paul’s account of the most important of Christian values, love. (The music doesn’t quote the hymn of the same name in full, though it alludes occasionally to it.)

The piece begins Cavafy’s poem where a mother prays for the return of her child from sea, but the Virgin, at whose shrine the mother kneels, knows that the boy has drowned and will never return. The mood suddenly lifts with Kinsella’s ‘Pantoum’ (the title refers to a Malay form which was adapted by Victor Hugo and Baudelaire in France, where the second and fourth lines of a stanza become the first and third of the following). The diction suggests a song made-up by children as they prepare to go out in a boat, but it contains elements of menace and transcendence as well as fatalism. In a few lines from the ballad ‘Sir Patrick Spens’, the sailors reveal that they know they will almost certainly perish at sea.

Hopkins’ The Wreck of the Deutschland from which I’ve taken two stanzas, is in part a lament for a number of refugees, exiled from Bismarck’s Germany, who drowned within sight of the Thames estuary when their ship foundered during a fierce storm. Hopkins deplores the institutional failure of love which led indirectly to the deaths of these people, but grants them a vision of heaven in the midst of their horror.

Hope in the face of loss is the theme of Kinsella’s ‘Tenebrae’, a meditation on the winter sea which threatens our past, symbolised by a ‘childhood hiding place’. The poem takes up the imagery of the Holy Week liturgy that enacts the entombment of Christ and the promise of the resurrection. Here the music alludes briefly to the plainchant hymn Pange lingua. We move to St Paul whose description of love establishes it as the central Christian value. Prophecy, wisdom and action are all imperfect and impermanent; we are, as he famously puts it, like children, but this state must and will pass away. In the meantime the only certainty in life is the power of love, which gives the voices in the final Kinsella poem ‘The Return’ the courage to set sail again, despite the wind being against them.

Gordon Kerry © 2005

The sea has taken a sailor to the deep

Unknowing, his mother lights

A candle at the Virgin’s shrine.

She prays for calm seas and

A favouring breeze to bring him home.

But as she prays, the icon gazes sadly

Knowing that he will never come again

(after Constantin Cafavy, ‘Prayer’)

souwester blows cold

ha ha says granma

you'll chill to the bone

out there on the water

ha ha says granma

we gotta anyway

out there on the water

that's where goes sun and moon

we gotta anyway

cold when it oughta be hot

that's where goes sun and moon

burst & mix with blue

cold when it oughta be hot

we saw it in the telescope

burst & mix with blue

burnt dark like the road

we saw it in the telescope

granpa let us look

burnt dark like the road

& too close to lie

(John Kinsella, ‘Pantoum’)

]

Make ready, make ready my merry men all

Our good ship sails the morn

O say not so, my master dear,

I fear a deadly storm!

Late yestereen, I saw the new moon

With the old moon in her arms

I fear, I fear, my master dear,

That we will come to harm.

They had not gone a league, a league

A league but barely three

When the lift grew dark and the wind blew loud

And gurly grew the sea

From ‘The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens’

Into the snows she sweeps,

Hurling the haven behind,

The ‘Deutschland’, on Sunday; and so the sky keeps,

For the infinite air is unkind,

And the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular blow,

Sitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind;

Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivellèd snow

Spins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.

Loathed for a love men knew in them,

Banned by the land of their birth,

Rhine refused them. Thames would ruin them;

Surf, snow, river and earth

Gnashed: but thou art above, thou Orion of light;

Thy unchancelling poising palms were weighing the worth,

Thou martyr-master: in thy sight

Storm flakes were scroll-leaved flowers, lily showers—sweet heaven was astrew in them.

from Gerard Manley Hopkins,’The Wreck of the Deutschland’

You are on the verge

of a resurrection,

standing on a fragile shoreline

erosion undermining

the limestone cliff-face,

expecting to plunge suddenly

into the churning ocean.

You’d rebuild memories, though this coastline

is always changing – a childhood

hiding place eroded,

an overhang collapsed

like the tide. Those

limestone columns

reaching towards a god

that would take your past

as if it were an offering.

But though the lights

one by one extinguish

as you explore deeper,

that final light–the sun–

grows stronger,

despite the coming winter,

the darkening seas.

(John Kinsella, ‘Tenebrae’)

Love is patient, love is kind.

It does not envy or boast, it is not proud.

Love bears all things, believes all things,

hopes and endures all things.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels,

If I have not love, I am as sounding brass,

Or a tinkling cymbal.

Though I have the gift of prophecy, understand all mysteries,

Know all things, and though my faith could move mountains,

If I have not love, I am nothing.

Though I give away all I have, and my body to the flames

If I have not love, I am nothing.

Love does not fail, but prophecy shall cease,

tongues shall be stilled and knowledge shall vanish away.

For we see as in a glass darkly, but then face to face.

When I was a child I spoke as a child I thought as a child

I reasoned as a child, but now I am grown

I put away childish things.

(St Paul, 1 Corinthians 13)

the ribbonweed tugs at the river mouth

the wind against me, i must tack away

and direct my course towards

a reconciliation …

(John Kinsella, ‘The Return’)

John Kinsella’s poems used by kind permission of the poet and Fremantle Arts Centre Press.