Poetry of Romantic and Economic Man

John Masefield’s “Cargoes” is a very fine poem, packing an enormous amount of imagery and atmosphere into eighty-seven words. It is clear, vivid and immediate, and has been deservedly enshrined as a classic and repeatedly anthologised:

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amethysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

Descriptive writing doesn’t get much better than that. Close your eyes and, if you have the smallest spark of poetry in your soul, you can see them all. At first glance the poem’s contents and point seem very simple: a nostalgic evocation of the romantic and gorgeous past as compared to the unromantic and unattractive present (in a way, not unlike T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in mood). This is how it has tended to be presented to generations of schoolchildren. However, on closer reading certain complexities and ambiguities are to be found. This little poem is by no means as simple as it seems.

The passage of the first two ships, the quinquireme “rowing home to haven” and the stately Spanish galleon “dipping through the tropics” seems apparently effortless, comfortable, and in harmony with the natural order of things, compared to the dirty British coaster “butting through the Channel”. The adjectives of the third stanza are filled with negative associations: dirty, butting, mad, pig, cheap, even salt-caked. There are no such negatively-loaded words in the first two stanzas, where the adjectives sunny, sweet, stately, palm-green are all more or less positive and bespeak tranquillity. The same contrast is present in the verbs: rowing, dipping, butting.

The quinquireme in this poem is like a dream: we do not know if quinquiremes, that is, ships rowed by five banks of oars, ever actually existed, and if they did they would have been warships. The location of Ophir is also doubtful. Nineveh and Palestine together can be seen as anachronistic.

It is dream-like in another way as well: in reality, if the British coaster is “dirty” it is a pretty safe bet that the quinquireme was a lot dirtier. It would (if it existed) have been rowed, in all probability, by slaves, and slave-rowed galleys, with their excrement-filled bilges, could be smelt before they could be seen over the horizon, a fact remarked upon even by the none-too-fastidious mariners of other ships.

The stately Spanish galleon would probably not be a lot better as far as cleanliness went. The Dutch vessel Batavia, very similar to a Spanish galleon, wrecked in 1629, was excavated off the coast of Western Australia not long ago. It was found that the excrement filling the bilges had, in 350 years under the sea, solidified into a tarry mass which had preserved various artefacts that had fallen into it, as well as undigested scraps of food which had passed through the passengers’ alimentary canals. All this was very rewarding for latter-day scientists and archaeologists, but it also suggested that such ships were not exactly temples of hygiene. The dirty British coaster is probably a great deal cleaner, even if its paint is flaking and the smoke-stack needs a scrub.

It can be argued that Masefield was not striving to be taken literally: rather, he was both evoking and describing a mood. Nostalgia is usually a matter of mystery, not a matter of realistic reportage. Similarly, he was not striving to be taken literally when, in another poem, a ballad describing the gory slaughters and plank-walkings committed by Long John Silver’s pirates, his narrator concludes:

Ah! The pig-tailed, quiddling pirates and the pretty pranks we played,
All have been put a stop to by the naughty Board of Trade:
The schooners and the merry crews are laid away to rest,
A little south of sunset, in the Islands of the Blest.

No, he was not literally wishing these abominable criminals back, and the whole poem is firmly and frankly in the realm of fantasy, and yet … Long John Silver, whether springing immortal from the pen of Stevenson or Masefield, has always been the most ambiguous of characters. Possibly Masefield was not making a value judgment at all, but simply saying: “This is what our images are. Consider them and you will see the ambiguities for yourself.”

Further, of course, the dirty British coaster offers its crew a life much better than did the quinquireme or the galleon, and there is no doubt that if the crews of either of the first two vessels found themselves somehow transported aboard the third they would think themselves in paradise. At the end of a voyage they could freely go ashore to the pub or the YMCA. Those with families would not have been separated from them for too long. Acts of parliament and other regulations governed their ship’s loading and set minimum safety standards, as well as protecting them from brutal (or later virtually any) punishments. Balanced diets and frequent landings would prevent scurvy. They probably had pension plans. Unlike the situation aboard the Spanish galleon, the crew would not need to go aloft on a dirty night to take in sail, or be tossed helplessly in a heavy sea or be driven by wind and tide to disaster on a lee shore. The chances of shipwreck were relatively remote.

Of course Masefield, who had been a real sailor, and a real sailing-ship man at that, knew all this perfectly well. He was one of the few major poets of the twentieth century who had experienced the hardships of a sailing man’s life.

Most importantly, the coaster “butted through the channel” because it could. A quinquireme would not have lasted long outside the relatively calm and easily-navigable Mediterranean—one reason the Romans did not venture into the Atlantic even in their more seaworthy galleys—and the stately Spanish galleons, as the Armada witnessed, could also come to grief in boisterous seas. These two could both be a good deal worse than merely “salt-caked” if they found themselves in a Channel gale.

The dirty British coaster, on the other hand, does not need to conform to the elements, but can defy or transcend them. As its smoke-stack bears witness, it is not dependent on wind like the galleon, or on human sweat like the quinquireme. It is a triumph of the human brain.

Further, an economist might make the point that the cargo of the quinquireme is basically useless novelties for the delectation (Oh dear! Am I sounding like a Marxist?) of a tiny handful of aristocrats. The cargo of the Spanish galleon also makes little or no economic sense, and probably no ethical sense either: the jewels and gold moidores, if the galleon avoids Sir Francis Drake and gets home to Spain, will simply fuel inflation and help speed the ruin of the Spanish empire. In any case, these have certainly been seized rapaciously from those who have to be called their rightful owners.

The cargo of the dirty British coaster, on the other hand, is useful, and it is virtually certain that it has been obtained through the operations of the market and a market price paid for it. It is conforming not to the laws of wind and tide but to the laws of supply and demand. The operations of the market mean that it is carrying things that people actually want. Whether the Tyne coal is going to power steam-engines or heat houses, it is probable that a lot of people are going to benefit from its delivery. And the word cheap has two very different meanings from the romantic and economic standpoints: it may mean shoddy, vulgar (itself a profoundly ambiguous word), nasty, even underhand and dishonourable (“a cheap trick”) but it may also mean inexpensive—“inexpensive tin trays” sounds a little different from “cheap tin trays”. The fact that the tin trays are “cheap” means people will be able to buy them cheaply. Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations:

“In every country it always is and must be in the interest of the great body of people to buy whatever they want of those who want to sell it cheapest. The proposition is so very manifest that it seems ridiculous to take any pains to prove it …”

Here too, the dirty British coaster represents a human triumph—the benefits of trade have become the common property of all. That, of course, is something many romantic poets and other artists have tended to despise, and to have regarded as a sign of a lowering and coarsening of the times they happen to live in.

William Blake, one of the worst examples of disconnected thinking (there are more unflattering terms for it) wrote indignantly of the plight of the poor, and was horrified by, among other things, the weaving mills which enabled the poor to pay less for clothes, and therefore to buy more and better clothes. Ironware and cheap tin trays are a similar case.

Philip Larkin lamented, evoking a scene of modern bleakness that makes the dirty British coaster of a generation before sound almost Elvishly romantic by comparison:

… residents from raw estate, brought down
The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys,
Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires—
Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies,
Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers …

How depressing that they should be able to buy such things, or want to live as well as they can! Yet having pointed, perhaps snobbishly, to the snobbery of the anti-economic, the thought persists that man does not live by bread alone: the imagination quickens at the idea of the quinquireme and the galleon. A dully utilitarian world is dull and diminished in many ways. A world of shoddy is shoddy. A culture without splendour and romance is hideous, soul-destroying and leaves those who inhabit it less than fully human. A world of nothing but “Cheap suits, electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers” is one from which to flee screaming. Consumerism is often stupidly and destructively slandered, but all the same none but a madman would think it the be-all and end-all. And in any case, is not consumerism itself romantic in a certain way?

The mundane coaster and its cargo cannot seem romantic and poetic except with an effort, or at least not in the same way. Here we see, summed up in the eighty-seven words of “Cargoes”, a great dilemma and difficulty—the disjunction between Romantic and Economic man, probably one of the most pervasive and also one of the most destructive fault-lines in our oddly-assembled, miraculously improbable, technological civilisation.

However, the disjunction is not total. The quinquireme, and even the galleon, for all the inflationary impact of the latter’s merchandise conveyed for the supposed benefit of an economically primitive and illiterate polity, by the act of trade tend to the enrichment of life in many senses.

It is a moot point whether the dully utilitarian world of the dirty British coaster completely replaces, drives out and destroys the ornate splendours, and even the closeness to, and apparent harmony with, nature, of the quinquireme and galleon. Does it have a splendour of its own, or does it expand the opportunities to experience splendours?

An advocate of the dirty British coaster might point out that, before the advent of steam, most people in Spain or Britain would have had no chance of experiencing the tropics and palm-green shores unless they were transported there as slaves or convicts, or, perhaps worse, as sailors before the mast. Now they can go there on package holidays. Some, of course, would say that that was anything but an improvement in the state of things, and by making the tropics and the palm-green shores available to any coarse, vulgar, knotted-handkerchief-on-head, beer-swilling, sandals-and-socks-wearing tourist, their romance has been destroyed. Fortunately I am under no compulsion to give any verdict on this argument.

The dirty British coaster, too, has some claim to romance in its own way. As far as I am concerned, a busy working harbour is one of the most reliably romantic places to be found in the world today. (There is a wonderful little essay by the Australian writer Olaf Ruhen on the romance of the world under the Sydney wharves.) The Australian poet Joyce Owen Starr apparently felt the same thing, describing in the poem “Blue Peter” passing the busy Sydney docks in a ferry-boat:

The white and scarlet ferry boats
Come creaming down the bay,
And rub their painted shoulders
With the tramp from Mandalay
And the liner bound for ’Frisco,
And the gay-flagged Betsy B.,
And the tub from Porto Rico,
And the barque from Barbary …

My heart puts out to sea …

There are apples in my cargo,
The holds are flowing full
Of frozen meat, and yellow wheat
And piling bales of wool.
I’ll bring back fretted ivory,
And laces sheer and fine,
And figs and dates and muscatels
From teeming Palestine
And pearly rice
And fragrant spice
And casks of amber wine.

The romantic and economic views are apparently—I would go as far as to say tragically—far apart but can be brought together in various ways with a little mental and artistic effort. Kipling wrote unequivocally of the romance of machinery in poems like “The King”, pointing out that we always see romance in the past, and have probably been doing so since “ignoble” flint replaced “well-carved” bone for arrow-heads. His greatest evocation of this is “McAndrew’s Hymn”, the song of praise of a dour old Scots steamship engineer contemplating the engines during the Middle Watch (when I set out to quote a couplet or so from this, I found it hard to stop):

The bairns see what their elders miss; they’ll hunt me to an’ fro,
Till for the sake of—well, a kiss—I tak’ ’em down below.
That minds me of our Viscount loon—Sir Kenneth’s kin—the chap
Wi’ Russia leather tennis-shoon an’ spar-decked yachtin’-cap.
I showed him round last week, o’er all—an’ at the last says he:
“Mister McAndrew, don’t you think steam spoils romance at sea?”
Damned ijjit! I’d been doon that morn to see what ailed the throws,
Manholin’, on my back—the cranks three inches off my nose.
Romance! Those first-class passengers they like it very well,
Printed an’ bound in little books; but why don’t poets tell?
I’m sick of all their quirks an’ turns—the loves an’ doves they dream—
Lord, send a man like Robbie Burns to sing the Song o’ Steam!
To match wi’ Scotia’s noblest speech yon orchestra sublime
Whaurto—uplifted like the Just—the tail-rods mark the time.
The crank-throws give the double-bass; the feed-pump sobs an’ heaves:
An’ now the main eccentrics start their quarrel on the sheaves.
Her time, her own appointed time, the rocking link-head bides,
Till—hear that note?—the rod’s return whings glimmerin’ through the guides.
They’re all awa’! True beat, full power, the clangin’ chorus goes
Clear to the tunnel where they sit, my purrin’ dynamoes.
Interdependence absolute, foreseen, ordained, decreed,
To work, Ye’ll note, at ony tilt an’ every rate o’ speed.
Fra’ skylight-lift to furnace-bars, backed, bolted, braced an’ stayed,
An’ singin’ like the Mornin’ Stars for joy that they are made …

McAndrew does not represent the complete successful union of the Economic (or practical) and Romantic Man. He presents a face to the world that is cold, grim, almost friendless. The first two lines quoted above hint at his desperate, unadmitted, loneliness. The one woman he has loved died thirty years previously. He is tortured by his own romantic longings, which his Calvinist background has conditioned him to regard as sinful. Though a poor man looking forward to a pensionless, penurious old age, he has even destroyed his plans for a potentially lucrative invention, presumably because of a Calvinist notion—plainly unshared by many of his co-religionists—that success is associated with wicked pride and vanity. Few but the most rabid Kipling-haters do not concede that “McAndrew’s Hymn” is a complex and successful work of art.

Anyway, McAndrew would probably associate the quinquireme and the galleon and their aura of romance with childish “rubbishry”—the word he uses for the exotic souvenirs which he (“an ijit grinning in a dream”) collected on his first foreign voyages—but a romance which Kipling, the author of “Mandalay”, could evoke as almost no other poet before or since. McAndrew is shown as a man kinder and even more lovable than he would dare let the world know, and even in a strange way a happy man, but emotionally maimed to a tragic degree, and his distrust of the sensually “romantic” is a symptom of that maiming. The reader can feel empathy with his anger that the romance of steam is not understood, but perhaps less empathy with his contempt for more conventional notions of the “Romantic”.

Kipling has, however, had conspicuously few followers among major poets in this evocation and advocacy of the romance of technical modernity, possibly because few latter- day poets have any knowledge or experience in the area (knowledge of practical matters can be useful for poets. T.S. Eliot may have been saved from following Ezra Pound further than he did into anti-Semitic paranoia because as a professional banker be knew something of how economics worked in the real world), partly because celebratory poetry of any sort is now seen as profoundly unfashionable and passé, which may be one of the reasons for poetry’s unpopularity today. The pseudo-Marxist “Pylon Poets” of the 1930s, who would probably have been horrified to have been called followers of Kipling, did not really create much in that genre of enduring poetic worth. Even the best of them, W.H. Auden, only really found his voice after he graduated from pylons (he also became an enthusiastic and eloquent admirer of Tolkien). Yet they were not entirely wrong—better to celebrate a pylon or a steel-mill than to create mindless word-games or to embrace a void of deconstructionist nihilism. In the nineteenth century steam locomotives were celebrated by, among many others, Turner in paint and, in America, by Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman in verse. In “The Railway Train” Emily Dickinson wrote:

I like to see it lap the miles,
And lick the valleys up,
And stop to feed itself at tanks;
And then prodigious, step
Around a pile of mountains …

Walt Whitman is generally thought of as a loafer with a certain gift for technically lazy but enthusiastic verse. However, he was, like Kipling, a poet of technology. For Whitman technology was to be celebrated as a giver of richness, opportunity and liberty, not shunned as being ugly or irrelevant to poetry’s legitimate concerns. His Leaves of Grass includes the following:

See, steamers steaming through my poems,
See, in my poems immigrants continually coming and landing …
See, in my poems, cities, solid, vast, inland, with paved streets, with iron and stone edifices, ceaseless vehicles, and commerce,
See, the many-cylinder’d steam printing-press—see, the electric telegraph stretching across the continent,
See, through Atlantica’s depths pulses American Europe reaching, pulses of Europe duly return’d,
See, the strong and quick locomotive as it departs, panting, blowing the steam-whistle,
See, ploughmen ploughing farms—see, miners digging mines—see, the numberless factories,
See, mechanics busy at their benches with tools–see from among them superior judges, philosophs, Presidents, emerge, drest in working dresses …

In “A Song of Occupations” Whitman celebrated:

The pump, the pile-driver, the great derrick, the coal-kiln and brick-kiln,
Coal-mines and all that is down there, the lamps in the darkness, echoes, songs, what meditations, what vast native thoughts looking through smutch’d faces,
Iron-works, forge-fires in the mountains or by river-banks, men around feeling the melt with huge crowbars, lumps of ore, the due combining of ore, limestone, coal,
The blast-furnace and the puddling-furnace, the loup-lump at the bottom of the melt at last, the rolling-mill, the stumpy bars of pig-iron, the strong, clean-shaped T-rail for railroads,
Oil-works, silk-works, white-lead-works, the sugar-house, steam-saws, the great mills and factories, … none lead to greater than these lead to.

And in “To a Locomotive in Winter”:

Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily careering;
Type of the modern—emblem of motion and power—pulse of the continent,
For once come serve the Muse and merge in verse, even as here I see thee,
With storm and buffeting gusts of wind and falling snow,
By day thy warning ringing bell to sound its notes,
By night thy silent signal lamps to swing.
Fierce-throated beauty!
Roll through my chant with all thy lawless music, thy swinging lamps at night …
Launch’d o’er the prairies wide, across the lakes,
To the free skies unpent and glad and strong.

Is this successful as poetry? I think it can at least be said not to wholly fail. Perhaps Whitman’s enthusiasm for technology was connected to the fact that he came from a very poor family and, unlike the aesthetes of the salons, knew what poverty and liberation from poverty meant.

That under-rated Australasian poet Will Lawson, incidentally, did write a quite stirring piece about a mail-ship, beginning:

The tail-rods leap in their bearings—
They rise with a rush and a ring;
They sink in the sound of laughter,
And hurried and short they sing—
We carry the Mails—
His Majesty’s Mails—
Make way for the Mails of the King!

Lawson, like McAndrew, speculated on whether the ship was carrying its cargo for good or evil, but seemed to resolve the question along the lines that it was no business of his: the “romance” of the thing is what matters and what gives it its poetic qualities.

Douglas Stewart pushed the matter into a new dimension. His “Professor Picard” was a romantic celebration of the scientist who pioneered both daring high-altitude balloon ascents and descents into the Oceanic abysses in a bathyscaphe. He described Picard in heroic terms and as an emblem of human questing and endeavour. Stewart’s “Rutherford” is a more intellectually complex poem, in which the great scientist wonders if, out of romantic curiosity—“just to be a school-boy winning a prize”—he may have ended human life on Earth, but also thinks of how radiation is already being used to “pierce the cancer cell”, and concludes that there is no going back. Nuclear research might bring mankind:

… more health, more food,
Drive the turbine, the dynamo, turn the wheel,
Blow up a mountain if it got in his road.
Let him be master of air and earth and ocean,
The whole wide world and the stars if he liked as well …

On the subject of machinery and technology in general and the difference which the differing standpoint makes, there is another, relatively little-known, poem by Kipling also worth quoting. It both uses atmosphere and texture and conveys a thought in some ways very similar to those of “Cargoes”:

The drowsy carrier sways
To the drowsy horses’ tramp.
His axles winnow the sprays
Of the hedge where the rabbit plays
In the light of his single lamp.

He hears a roar behind,
A howl, a hoot, and a yell,
A headlight strikes him blind
And a stench o’erpowers the wind
Like a blast from the mouth of Hell.

He mends his swingle-bar,
And loud his curses ring;
But a mother watching afar
Hears the hum of the doctor’s car
Like the beat of an angel’s wing …

Argument and logic can demonstrate fairly easily that various economic and technological processes provide good outcomes. To make them seem poetic, to have them fill the heart with longing and yearning, or at least not to have them seem the actual enemies of poetry, romance and die blaue Blume, is a different and altogether more difficult matter. One of the hugest and most complex dilemmas of modern life, which “Cargoes” points to with brilliant conciseness, is that the Economic and Romantic views of life tend to exclude one another and to regard one another in an adversarial way, yet neither can even begin to offer a complete conception of life without the other.