Ear worms

Ever had an earworm of snatches of verse? It's usually bad popular music or an advertising jingle that buzzes irritatingly in the brain, displacing all other thoughts whether noble or ignoble; but one night last week I couldn't sleep because some incomplete verses by one-time poet laureate John Masefield kept buzzing about in my brain. Or I thought they were John Masefield's poems. ODTAA, as Masefield put it in the title of one of his novels (ODTAA = One Damned Thing After Another). For inscrutable reasons I felt impelled to recover the lines I couldn't remember. They aren't even very good poetry. 

It turned out that there were two poems I couldn't remember completely,  both with a 'nautical' theme. Why did they leap unbidden into consciousness?  Probably it was because I've been writing some reminiscences about the sea, my experience with storms at sea as observed from cargo ships, and learning to swim in the sea when I was about 6 years old.  It took me a while to track down my two poems, because I was sure John Masefield was responsible for both, and because I misremembered the first line of one of the poems -- once I'd established that my poetic earworms came from two poets, not one, things began to fall into place: "Drake's Drum" isn't by John Masefield, but by Sir Henry Newbolt, a jingoist late 19th century poet who lived on in obscurity into the third decade of the 20th Century.

Here are the lines from Newbolt's "Drake's Drum" that teased me into wakefulness last week:

"Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore, 
Strike et when your powder's runnin' low; 
If the Dons sight Devon, I'll quit the port o' Heaven, 
An' drum 'em up the Channel as we drumm'd 'em long ago." 

Don't ask why that was churning and bubbling in my brain. No explanation makes sense. These lines, by the way, are from somewhere in the middle of the poem. Missing a word here and there, they were the lines that teased me into wakefulness one night last week, along with other lines that are indubitably Masefield's.

I went back to my Sixth Form Albatross Book of Living Verse, which I've kept since 1943 because it is such an excellent anthology, and discovered that excellent though it is, it is poorly indexed. It didn't help at all to fill the blanks in my memory of Masefield's poem called "Cargoes" - which isn't in the Albatross Book of Living Verse - but I didn't help my initially fruitless search by misremembering the first line of the first verse. The line that swirled in my aged brain was the first line of the third verse, not the first. The first line of the first verse begins: 

  "Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir..."

And the verse I wanted is the third, which goes:

"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."

The troublesome third, fourth and fifth lines didn't make it into conscious memory so they were missing from my earworm. Why does any of this matter?  It doesn't. I merely want to embellish some seafaring reminiscences. Maybe I can find a place to quote Masefield's "Cargoes" which is marginally relevant to the stuff I'm writing about traveling the world as a ship's surgeon on passenger-carrying cargo ships, a series of experiences that were high points of my life. And it's a rollicking set of verses withal.

Neither poem, by the way, is in that splendid Sixth Form anthology, which contains mostly more cerebral poetry. "Drake's Drum" and "Cargoes" would both have been in a collection more suitable for younger schoolboys. Probably we had to study them and perhaps had to learn them by heart, when I was in the Fourth Form, two years earlier. I'm in Google's debt, not any of my books of poetry, for coming to the aid of my imperfect memory.

All that said, browsing that anthology of poems, and a few other volumes of poems on my shelves,  has been time very well spent this weekend.