Kenneth Slessor - Five Bells

It’s funny how you can arrive at something via many different paths or a path for which you did not plan.  That’s how it was for me with the poem Five Bells by Kenneth Slessor.  I remember saying in an earlier post, quite emphatically, that Five Bells was too full of hidden meaning for me to appreciate.  I know they study the poem at school and it’s considered Slessor’s best work, but for the times I had tried to read and understand it, the thing forever seemed too difficult – “Deep and dissolving verticals of light    Ferry the falls of moonshine down;  Why thieve these profitless lodgings from the flukes of thought anchored in time? …………?”

And that’s how Five Bells might have remained for me.  Except, I’m driving home from work a couple of weeks back listening to Radio National and they’re playing a track from a newly released album – a collaboration between the Australian National Academy of Music and singer song writer, Paul Kelly.  I like Paul Kelly’s work.  The experience gets better – the album is called, Conversations with Ghosts, and it’s a collection of poetry from a number of known poets where Paul Kelly sings their poetry set to modern classical music.  Each poem has a, talking to the dead, reflection, bells or ghost experience about it, so you’ve got poets like W. B. Yeats, Emily Dickinson, and of course, Kenneth Slessor with Five Bells.  Hearing the words from Five Bells being sounded out made a big difference to my interest in the poem.  I could hear that it had something to do with the ringing and sound of a ship’s bell – that also got my interest.  I did some research to find out why the poem was written and who it was about.  Essentially, Slessor is looking out on Sydney harbour at night while reminiscing about a friend and work colleague of his (Joe Lynch) who went missing off the back of a ferry, presumed drowned, because they never found the body – controversy over whether he fell or jumped.  It does help in understanding the poem if you do some background reading on Joe Lynch.  His biography is pretty much followed throughout the poem – the drowning in the first couple of verses; mad drinking sessions; walking out to a friends place at Moorebank; living and working in Melbourne as a cartoonist on Punch magazine; back to Sydney working on Smith’s Weekly; drinking and partying (reports say Joe sunk because he was wearing an overcoat weighed down with bottles of beer he was taking to a party on the North Shore); his father, a fiddle player and stone mason carving graveyard headstones for a living. 

Another aid to understanding Five Bells is to have knowledge of the maritime tradition of ringing a ship’s bell to denote time.  The title Five Bells is a direct reference to the maritime time-keeping system, so here it is.  A ship’s daily routine is broken up into 6, four-hour watches:

 

Midnight to 4am (middle watch);

4am to 8am (morning watch);

8am to 12noon (forenoon watch);

12 pm to 4pm (afternoon watch);

4pm to 8pm (dog watch – usually split into 2, two hour watches); and

8pm to midnight (first watch)

 

During each four hour watch, the ship’s bell is struck sharply on each half hour (8 ‘bells’ in total).  To signal a complete hour, the bell is struck in a quick ‘double’ bell movement (ding-ding!) and the half hour is signalled by an additional ‘single’ bell movement (ding-ding! …….. ding!).  So ‘Five Bells’ indicates it is two and a half hours into a watch (ding-ding!  ding-ding! …….. ding!).  The question is, in which ‘watch’ is Slessor’s Five Bells rang out?  It must be either the first watch (10.30pm) or the middle watch (2.30am) because it is definitely at night – ‘Night and water Pour to one rip of darkness ………. ‘, ‘I look out my window in the dark ………. ‘, ‘ ………. in the moon’s drench ….. ‘.  It is unlikely to be the middle watch because the bell is not normally rung in harbour at night at this time in the morning (disturbs the neighbours).  So we imagine Slessor is sitting up around 10.30pm, pondering upon the settling lights and night sounds of dark harbour …….

Five Bells

(Kenneth Slessor, 1901 - 1971)

 

Time that is moved by little fidget wheels

Is not my Time, the flood that does not flow.

Between the double and the single bell

Of a ship’s hour, between a round of bells

From the dark warship riding there below,

I have lived many lives, and this one life

Of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells.

 

Deep and dissolving verticals of light

Ferry the falls of moonshine down.  Five bells

Coldly rung out of a machine’s voice.  Night and water

Pour to one rip of darkness, the Harbour floats

In air, the Cross hangs upside-down in water.

 

Why do I think of you, dead man, why thieve

These profitless lodgings from the flukes of thought

Anchored in Time?  You have gone from earth,

Gone even from the meaning of a name;

Yet something’s there, yet something forms its lips

And hits and cries against the ports of space,

Beating their sides to make its fury heard.

 

Are you shouting at me, dead man, squeezing your face

In agonies of speech on speechless panes?

Cry louder, beat the windows, bawl your name!

 

But I hear nothing, nothing . . . only bells,

Five bells, the bumpkin calculus of Time.

Your echoes die, your voice is dowsed by Life,

There’s not a mouth can fly the pygmy strait –

Nothing except the memory of some bones

Long shoved away, and sucked away, in mud;

And unimportant things you might have done,

Or once I thought you did; but you forgot,

And all have now forgotten – looks and words

And slops of beer; your coat with buttons off,

Your gaunt chin and pricked eye, and raging tales

Of Irish kings and English perfidy,

And dirtier perfidy of publicans

Groaning to God from Darlinghurst.

Five bells.

 

Then I saw the road, I heard the thunder

Tumble, and felt the talons of the rain

The night we came to Moorebank in slab-dark,

So dark you bore no body, had no face,

But a sheer voice that rattled out of air

(As now you’d cry if I could break the glass),

A voice that spoke beside me in the bush,

Loud for a breath or bitten off by wind,

Of Milton, melons and the Rights of Man,

And blowing flutes, and how Tahitian girls

Are brown and angry-tongued, and Sydney girls

Are white and angry-tongued, or so you’d found.

But all I heard was words that didn’t join

So Milton became melons, melons girls,

And fifty mouths it seemed, were out that night,

And in each tree an Ear was bending down,

Or something had just run, gone behind grass,

When, blank and bone-white, like a maniac’s thought,

The naphtha-flash of lightning slit the sky,

Knifing the dark with deathly photographs.

There’s not so many with so poor a purse

Or fierce a need, must fare by night like that,

Five miles in darkness on a country track,

But when you do, that’s what you think

Five bells.

 

In Melbourne, your appetite had gone,

Your angers too; they had leeched away

By the soft archery of summer rains

And the sponge-paws of wetness, the slow damp

That stuck the leaves of living, snailed the mind,

And showed your bones, that had been sharp with rage,

The sodden ecstasies of rectitude.

I thought of what you had written in faint ink,

Your journal with the sawn-off lock, that stayed behind

With other things you left, all without use,

All without meaning now, except a sign

That someone had been living who was now dead:

“At Labassa.  Room 6 x 8

On top of the tower; because of this, very dark

And cold in winter.  Everything has been stowed

Into this room 500 books all shapes

And colours, dealt across the floor

And over the sills and on the laps of chairs;

Guns, photos of many different things

And different curioes that I obtained . . . . “

 

In Sydney by the spent aquarium-flare

Of penny gaslight on pink wallpaper,

We argued about blowing up the world,

But you were living backward, so each night

You crept a moment closer to the breast,

And they were living, all of them, those frames

And shapes of flesh that had perplexed your youth,

And most your father, the old man gone blind,

With fingers always round a fiddle’s neck,

That graveyard mason whose fair monuments

And tablets cut with dreams of piety

Rest on the bosoms of a thousand men

Staked bone by bone, in quiet astonishment

At cargoes they had never thought to bear,

These funeral-cakes of sweet and sculptured stone.

 

Where have you gone?  The tide is over you,

The turn of midnight water’s over you,

As time is over you, and mystery,

And memory, the flood that does not flow.

You have no suburb, like those easier dead

In private berths of dissolution laid –

The tide goes over, the waves ride over you

And let their shadows down like shining hair,

But they were Water, and the sea-pinks bend

Like lilies in your teeth, but they are Weed,

And you are only part of an Idea.

I felt the wet push its black thumb-balls in,

The night you died, I felt your eardrums crack,

And the short agony, the longer dream,

The nothing that was neither long nor short,

But I was bound, and could not go that way,

But I was blind, and could not feel your hand.

If I could find an answer, could only find

Your meaning, or could say why you were here

Who now are gone, what purpose gave you breath

Or seized it back, might I not hear your voice?

 

I look out of my window in the dark

At waves with diamond quills and combs of light

That arched their mackerel-backs and smacked the sand

In the moon’s drench, that straight enormous glaze,

And ships far off asleep, and Harbour-bouys

Tossing their fireballs wearily each to each,

And tried to hear your voice, but all I heard

Was a boat’s whistle, and the scraping squeal

Of seabirds’ voices far away, and bells,

Five bells.  Five bells coldly ringing out.

Five bells.

Slessor wrote Five Bells in 1937, ten years after Joe Lynch drowned.  In an interview published in the Daily Telegraph, 31^st July, 1967 (Bread & Wine, Kenneth Slessor, Angus & Robertson, 1970), Slessor said part of his inspiration for Five Bells came from an old Arabian fairy-tale where a man dips his face in a basin of magic water and between the time he dips his head in and withdraws it (5 seconds, 5 bells), he dreams he has lived another life - sailed many voyages, been shipwrecked and captured by pirates, married a princess, fought in battles and finally executed.  The fairy-tale suggests the life the man experiences as vision is just as real as his actual life except it was lived on another time-scale (who’s to say it wasn’t for ‘real’?).

In reminiscing, Slessor realises he can imagine, replay in memory, the whole span of Joe Lynch’s human life (or a human life) in the interval between the strokes of a ship’s bell (ding-ding!  ding-ding! …….. ding!).  Five Bells is written with the two time-scales interposed upon each other – the mechanical time-scale of five bells being rung out in three to five seconds, and a memory time-scale that compresses the thirty years of Joe Lynch’s life into the same five seconds (note the words, Five Bells repeated three times throughout the poem – 3 seconds of the ship’s bell; 3 decades of Joe Lynch’s life).  The words remind the reader that at that particular point in the poem a lengthy period of time has advanced along the time-scale of Joe Lynch’s life, but it has only occupied a few moments on the mechanical time-scale of the ship’s bell.

The construction of the poem gets us thinking about time and the mystery of time in relation to memory, ‘the flood that does not flow.’  What is memory?  It comes in a chronological order but it does not advance or ‘flow’ in the same pace or manner as real time.  It can be held in a compressed form.  We mechanically measure real time by it’s passage, but time may simply be this moment, nothing more than now.  Anything in front of now does not exist.  Anything behind is compressed in memory, mystery ….

“The turn of midnight water’s over you,

As time is over you, and mystery,

And memory, the flood that does not flow.”

 

I’ve dug up another old poem of mine as a link to this post.  Father Ashley is my midnight reflection on another man’s life.  A man who lives in my memory, who lives in the compressed time-scale of memory, between the double check that the cars are locked and the single throw of the front door latch before I go to bed, at Five Bells ……..

1992.  Living in Sydney, in the Catholic faith, I met an old priest during frequent visits to Melbourne.  At the time it seemed an odd friendship.  Little insights and understandings came much later; Father Ashley insights.  How important is it that other people hold us in their minds?  What happens when there’s nobody to pray for us?  What is life without prayer?

Father Ashley

 

Father Ashley, you must be dead now.

When was it?  ’76 or ’77?

Did you think I was a visionary convert?

Did you think I knew what you knew?

You pursued me.

I felt you took an interest in me that wasn’t encouraged.

And I, like always, to all people,

Dealt with you at arms length.

 

Remember 4/187 West Street?

I cooked us a meal there more than once.

You would visit Sydney,

And stay at the North Sydney Jesuit College.

I would look you up there and drive you to my place.

There was one time when you were in the city,

At that little old church at the western end of George Street,

Almost going into Parramatta Road.

It never dawned on me to remember why you were there.

 

You always knew when I was in Melbourne.

I don’t think I got in touch.

I think others used to do that for me.

You were a priest put out to pasture,

At Campion College, Kew.

Your stationary showed an embossed crest,

Oh, that’s right, there was the occasional letter.

Why didn’t I keep them?

 

Were you lonely?

Is that why you sought out my company?

Did you want to talk?

But what could I possibly say that you would want to hear?

Were you expecting to hear me speak of discovering the Truth, maybe?

When I didn’t even know I was looking for it?

Couldn’t you see me for what I really was?

Were you so easily fooled?

 

Looking back I’m ashamed to admit,

I did think you were a bit of a fool,

A little man.

You always wore your black coat and wide clerical collar,

Manacled about loose skin.

You giggled and fussed and shuffled and shook a little

Because you were old.

I wondered why the hell I was with you at all.

 

Father Ashley, I remember only one thing you ever said,

You asked me seriously if I prayed.

“Do you pray”? you said.

I remember I struggled with the answer,

I didn’t really know if I did but I thought I didn’t but should’ve.

I said yes, hoping that would be the end of it.

You seemed satisfied with the answer, remember,

For you were quite serious again when you asked,

“Will you pray for me”?

 

Couldn’t you see me for what I was?

Couldn’t you see through me?

Were you so easily fooled?

                                               J. O. White

Kennneth Slessor - Beach Burial

Retaining a Naval theme, I’m going to go from light-hearted verse (Bab Ballads) to one of Kenneth Slessor’s most famous poems, a poem of great pity, and one that plays on my mind.  The poem is Beach Burial.  Slessor wrote this when he was a war correspondent covering Australian soldiers fighting in the Middle East theatre, WWII, 1942.  Even if you knew nothing of Slessor’s life, a reading of the poem makes it obvious that the poet has observed and experienced what he is writing about – obvious that he has listened to gunfire, near and in the distance, the sob and clubbing; obvious that he has looked on rough wooden crosses in the sand, the driven stake of tidewood.  And this is borne out in Kenneth Slessor’s own war despatches where the reports of what he witnessed, later appear in his poem - this from two of his despatches:-

"...for a few moments at a little cluster of Australian graves. They were huddled together, as if taking cover on the slope of a hill... The crosses were the simple sides of packing cases nailed at right angles and the inscriptions, written with careful clumsiness in indelible pencil, had been smeared violet by the rain"...(War Despatches, 262).  "A beach in the Gulf of Arabs, two miles from El Alamein, dazzle-white in the morning sunlight and lined with slabs of driftwood over the sandy graves of 'unknown sailors' washed up in dozens with the tide. The guns were clubbing away in the west"..(War Despatches, 394).
Maybe I'm wrong, but I come across numerous analyses of Beach Burial where people seem to want more meaning from the poem than I believe the poem contains - 'futility of war'; 'man's inhumanity to man'; 'bravery, love, sacrifice, dignity, non-judgemental neutrality of those going out and burying the dead'; 'the folly of people allowing themselves to be fooled by political deception'; 'the opposing struggle of good against evil and final forgiveness in the uniting of all peoples on the other front' - etcetera, etcetera.  Why must we think there has to be profound meaning lurking in every great poem!?  To me, in Beach Burial Slessor writes 'meaning' just as he saw it; - go back and read his despatches.  I get a feeling of great pity from the poem, but I believe this is created from the brilliant construction and form that Slessor renders in the poem rather than any 'meaning' he has woven or wishes to express in content. 
If I were a year 12 student again, then I would accept the content of Beach Burial for what it says, and use it as a poem that shows me a lot about construction.  What strikes me in the construction of the poem is the use of part-rhyme and the repetition of sounds.  Part-rhyme at the end of the second and fourth lines of each quatrain and within every third line. Five beats to each verse first line (trochee feet?).  The repetition of dominant sounds – ‘signature’, ‘driven’, ‘written’, ‘perplexity’, ‘pity’, ‘begin’, ‘pencil’, ‘drips’, ‘inscriptions’, ‘lips’……….

Beach Burial

(Kenneth Slessor, 1901 - 1971)

 

Softly and humbly to the Gulf of Arabs

The convoys of dead sailors come;

At night they sway and wander in the waters far under,

But morning rolls them in the foam.

 

Between the sob and clubbing of the gunfire

Someone, it seems, has time for this,

To pluck them from the shallows and bury them in burrows

And tread the sand upon their nakedness;

 

And each cross, the driven stake of tidewood,

Bears the last signature of men,

Written with such perplexity, with such bewildered pity,

The words choke as they begin –

 

‘Unknown seaman’ – the ghostly pencil

Wavers and fades, the purple drips,

The breath of the wet season has washed their inscriptions

As blue as drowned men’s lips,

 

Dead seaman, gone in search of the same landfall,

Whether as enemies they fought,

Or fought with us, or neither, the sand joins them together,

Enlisted on the other front.

 

El Alamein

 

It’s with a fair degree of humility that I now put my poem, With the Loss of Many Hands alongside Kenneth Slessor’s Beach Burial.  It’s a similar subject matter that influences me, but in no way do I render my poem with the skill of Slessor.  Though I do lay down a form by which I try to express the fear, forlorn and pity of men bonded in a ship’s company facing inevitable death as their ship goes down.  I don’t name any particular ship in the poem, but the influence is from reflection on two Australian Naval disasters - HMAS Sydney and HMAS Voyager.  HMAS Sydney was a WWII light cruiser ambushed and sunk by a German raider, Kormoran, in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia, 1941.  HMAS Voyager was a Daring class destroyer sunk in peace-time, 10^th February, 1964, when she collided with the aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne during night exercises off Jervis Bay.

2011.  I reflect on the loss, and recent discovery of HMAS Sydney.  Also on the HMAS Voyager disaster (nearer to my time).  Both involved a heavy loss of life - 645 men on Sydney and 82 on Voyager.  An early photograph from the Sydney wreck was of a pair of black shoes (pusser’s crabs) sitting perfectly together on the seabed.  Who owned the shoes? and what is the feeling of being trapped, going down with a ship?  Accounts of the last moments of the forrard section of Voyager report that the coxswain, being too big to fit through the escape scuttle, helped others to get out and led the remainder in singing, up to the time the ship quickly disappeared.

HMAS Voyager

With the Loss of Many Hands 

Sight.

When we could see there was nobody else,

with damage reports giving stock of the situation,

the water-tight doors were dogged down tight,

never to be re-opened.

Emergency lanterns

discharged feeble light,

a tobacco stained orange glow

inches from the glass lens,

not enough to break the night,

but sufficient to illuminate

our patience and forlorn,

before that too faded from sight.

 

Sound.

 

There’s awful quiet when life leaves a ship.

Hull and fire pumps dead silent,

no whisper of air, down

trunking punkers, nothing.

Each clang of metal on metal,

creaking strained plates pound,

pulling against, and together

with forces beyond design, accentuated

now, no other sound

to muffle them.

Like a ship gone dead in dry-dock,

or gone aground,

or gone dead at four o’clock alongside.

Water filled and sloshed

until it’s level was found,

the sea’s noise trying to reach us,

gurgled on the other side of black bulkheads.

Somebody stepped up, bound

to take charge,

so there’s confidence of direction

and purpose in a frantic crowd,

but our purpose was steadily clear,

and the quiet,

not needed for repeated command,

lurked and pressed like a waiting ghost,

so the somebody

started us all singing aloud,

anything, not to have the awkwardness

of a silent world.

And we chose hymns for the sound.

 

Touch.

 

Wet body on wet body,

warm and alive,

thankful for company however much,

but also aware of personal annoyance,

because once familiar surfaces

now bumped and tripped in a mad crush,

where the urge was to come up from down below,

but the deck-head formed the ship’s side

and the distance athwart-ships became such

an impossible height, to

the only escape hatch above,

so hands grabbed hands, arms rough

tightened on the next pair of legs

and pushed up in a line-out,

the lightest and youngest were first, dispatched

with male love and encouragement,

come on son, out you go,

and they won’t forget the touch.

 

Smell.

 

With the blackness,

nostrils flared from adrenalin

sucked volumes, volumes expelled

in what was not breathing

but a demand we put on life’s gift.

Every now and then a familiar whiff tells

of hemp scent, wet from the bosun’s store,

turps, lagging and enamel sloshing in a paint locker

burnt out electrics and battery cells,

with brief reminder

of home comforts and security

by fresh baking and bedding smells.

 

Taste.

 

We thought we tasted the stale air

and fear,

until the first mouthful of waste

furnace oil,

and then it was only our tongues

we could taste.

                                                       J. O. White



HMAS Sydney

Slessor - 'Metempsychosis', an interpretation.

In my blog I don't set myself up to be a critic or to joust in the world of academics, but I feel compelled to set the record straight about the meaning of Kenneth Slessor's poem Metempsychosis.  As I've posted previously, I love this poem.  It's one of my favourite Slessor poems.  I've been influenced by it in my own work.  It has profound meaning to me and brings me closer to Slessor, the man than some of his other poems.  So I'm cruising the net keen to see how others feel about Metempsychosis and I come across essays and interviews that just blow my mind.  How can people apply these interpretations?  It makes me wonder whether it's the reason Slessor stopped publishing well before his time.  Poetry and art - why does one assume there must be greater meaning; why do some poets feel they must obscure meaning?  This is an extract of an essay/journal written by Kate Lilley, "Living Backward" (Slessor & Masculine Elegy), University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1997 (www.austlit.edu.au).  The extract gives an interpretation of Metempsychosis.  Now I don't know the context in which Kate wrote, or had to write the essay.  Maybe she had to argue along a certain academic line about a poem selected purely for study.  Anyway, this is Kenneth Slessor's Metempsychosis, Kate's critique, and my take on the poem:

 

Metempsychosis

(Kenneth Slessor, 1901 - 1971)

 

Suddenly to become John Benbow, walking down William

               Street

With a tin trunk and a five-pound note, looking for a place

               to eat,

And a peajacket the colour of a shark’s behind

That a Jew might buy in the morning ……

 

To fry potatoes (God save us!) if you feel inclined,

Or to kiss the landlady’s daughter, and no one mind,

In a peel-papered bedroom with a whistling jet

And a picture of the Holy Virgin ………

 

Wake in a shaggy bale of blankets with a fished-up

               cigarette,

Picking over ‘Turfbird’s Tattle’ for a Saturday morning

               bet,

With a bottle in the wardrobe easy to reach

And a blast of onions from the landing ……..

 

Tattooed with foreign ladies’ tokens, a heart and dagger

               Each,

In places that make the delicate female inquirer screech,

And over a chest smoky with gunpowder-blue –

Behold! – a mermaid piping through a coach-horn!

 

Banjo-playing, firing off guns, and other momentous things

               to do,

Such as blowing through pea-shooters at hawkers to

               Improve the view –

 

Suddenly paid-off and forgotten in Woolloomooloo ……

 

Suddenly to become John Benbow …….

 

Kate Lilley (Slessor & Masculine Elegy). "In “Metempsychosis” Slessor projects himself into the generic character of John Benbow and the romance of urban shiftlessness:  “Suddenly paid-off and forgotten in Woolloomooloo”.  Benbow is offered as the icon of spontaneous, independent, improvised masculinity, free from work and routinised heterosexual domesticity (of the kind which encumbers Alexander Home): “walking down William Street/With a tin trunk and a five-pound note, looking for a place to eat”.  His tattooed body, with its “places that make the delicate female inquirer screech”, is the ground of the inscription of desire, but Slessor's desire is nothing less than “Suddenly to become John Benbow …”, the phrase with which Slessor opens and closes the circle of his intricately and asymmetrically rhymed poem with its long, rangy (“walking”) line.  A triple rhyme (“do”, “view”, “Woolloomooloo”) leads to the suspended last line, “Suddenly to become John Benbow …” the only unrhymed line in the poem, but also an exact repetition of the poem's opening phrase.  The final aposiopesis marks a space of contingency and overlap, but also of equivocation and impossibility. It is both an attempt “suddenly” to instantiate Slessor as Benbow, to effect metempsychosis, and a strategy to keep the wishful circuit of metempsychosis open, to indicate a suspended structure of eternal return."

 

I have a completely different take on John Benbow compared to the interpretation offered by Kate Lilley.  To me the poem is about a sailor, a matelot, a junior rating, a man who has done his time in the Navy.  It is not "Slessor projecting himself into a generic character (John Benbow) or a suggested romance of urban shiftlessness".  How do we know this?  Because:

 

“Walking down William Street” – Slessor didn't place John Benbow in William Street by chance.  William Street is the major road leading up to Kings Cross in Sydney.  Kings Cross is a red-light / night-life suburb at the bottom of which is Garden Island, the main naval base for the Royal Australian Navy (in Slessor’s time anyway).  Every Australian service man who ever pulled on blue serge knows William Street (and also thousands of swabs, gobs, tars, shellbacks who have ever visited from foreign navies).  If you’re up the ‘Cross’ or ‘walking down William Street’, then there’s a greater than even chance you’re a ‘pusser’ (a sailor).  Slessor lived all his life up around the ‘Cross’ and Darlinghurst.  He spent time as a war correspondent in WWII.  He would have been very familiar with sailors, their social mannerisms, habits and behaviours around Kings Cross.

 

“With a tin trunk and a five pound note looking for a place to eat …..”  This is not Slessor painting a picture of himself with some hidden desire to be "spontaneous, independent, improvised masculinity, free from work and routinised heterosexual domesticity".  No, this is John Benbow, the poor bastard who has only this minute taken his discharge from the Navy.  The ‘tin trunk’ is a sailor’s sea chest containing all of his kit and worldly possessions (in Slessor’s time; later to become a ‘kit bag’).  The ‘five pound note’ is the sailor’s final discharge pay, leave and travel allowance. 

“And a peajacket the colour of a shark’s behind” – Sailors wear ‘peajackets’ (not "icons of spontaneous, …. routinised heterosexual domesticity"). This is referring to a sailor’s winter dress uniform, referred to as ‘blues’, though the actual cloth colour is not blue, it’s black.  With sea weathering and wear, the colour may become like the ‘colour of a shark’s behind’.  The discharged sailor (John Benbow) has no further use of his uniform so he will hock it and see if he can get some money for it (in the morning).

 

“His tattooed body, with its “places that make the delicate female inquirer screech”, is the ground of the inscription of desire”.  Kate has got this all wrong.  Slessor says John Benbow has got tattoos located in places on his body that make females screech.  Kate’s interpretation implies that it is the male body itself that has places that make females screech (big difference, and shows Kate has never been out with a sailor – not a tattooed sailor, anyway).  “the ground of the inscription of desire??” 

 

“Suddenly paid off and forgotten in Woolloomooloo”.  The term, ‘paid off’ refers to sailors who have been discharged from the Navy – “I’m paid off; when did you pay off? He’s been paid off for years; that’ll be the day when he pays off, a lifer he is”.

 

The final aposiopesis marks a space of contingency and overlap, but also of equivocation and impossibility.  The way Slessor ends the poem (aposiopesis – breaking off of speech) doesn’t reveal the poet’s self reflection and regret of an impossibility, Slessor isn’t John Benbow, he is not saying he wants to transmigrate into John Benbow (“it is both an attempt “suddenly” to instantiate Slessor as Benbow, to effect metempsychosis, and a strategy to keep the wishful circuit of metempsychosis open, to indicate a suspended structure of eternal return.”).  The ending, “Suddenly to become John Benbow . . . .”

reflects a regret from the character John Benbow himself, not Slessor.   In a previous life John Benbow wasn’t John Benbow. He was a serving member of the Navy, known by his rank, a part of a whole who shared in the success and achievements of the whole. But now he’s suddenly become just another bloke called, ‘John Benbow’, and all the silly things he crafted as part of his character in the Navy now no longer matter. Shocked awake by his discharge. This is what the poem is about. If anything, it challenges the notion of people becoming institutionalised from serving in military organisations.   Some are afraid to leave; some can’t; some do and find that life is completely different from what they know and expect and they find it difficult to cope.