John Masefield - Fever Chills

“I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky” ………. Oh yeah, I may mess around with poems about princes and alternate psychology, failed love and pets I’ve had, but after I’m done with all that, and I’m bored from being ashore and I’m bored with lubber prose then I’ve got to breathe salt air and taste the salty sea once more.  That’s when I turn to men like John Masefield.  And what better poem than Masefield’s Fever Chills to put me arm in arm again with characters doing their time at sea.  This is one of my favourite Masefield poems, the poor bastard at the bottom of the pecking order in a voice, a language and a behaviour that is absolutely historical in it’s preservation of how sailors once thought and talked ………. and hopefully, probably, still do.  I believe the 'Chief' in Fever Chills was still in when I was doing my time on Vendetta.

                                                          Fever-Chills

                                                                           (John Masfield 1878 - 1967)

 

He tottered from the alleyway with cheeks the colour

        of paste,

And shivered a spell and mopped his brow with a clout

        of cotton waste:

“I’ve got a lick of the fever-chills,” he said, “ ‘n’ my inside it’s

        green,

But I’d be as right as rain,” he said, “if I had some

        quinine, --

But there ain’t no quinine for us poor sailor-men.

 

“But them there passengers,” he said, “if they gets

        fever-chills,

There’s brimmin’ buckets o’ quinine for them, ‘n’ bulgin’

        crates o’ pills,

‘N’ a doctor with Latin ‘n’ drugs ‘n’ all – enough to sink

        a town,

‘N’ they lies quiet in their blushin’ bunks ‘n’ mops their

        gruel down, --

But there ain’t none ‘o them fine ways for us poor

        sailor-men.

 

But the Chief comes forrard ‘n’ he says, says he, ‘I

        gives you a straight tip:

Come none o’ your Cape Horn fever lays aboard o’ this

        yer ship.

On wi’ your rags o’ duds, my son, ‘n’ aft, ‘n’ down the

        hole:

The best cure known for fever-chills is shovelling bloody

        coal.’

It’s hard, my son, that’s what it is, for us poor sailor-

        men

In this post I’m including two short pieces from a eulogy I wrote in honour of my grandmother’s youngest brother (Jimmy Oliver) who died as a prisoner of war in Sandakan, Borneo in 1945.  Jimmy was with the Australian 8^th Division, 2/10^th Field Regiment, sent to Malaya in 1941 to safeguard Singapore should the Japanese attack.  We all know how that turned out.  Anyway, I like to think Jimmy and his mates maintained their Aussie, larrikin and military sense of humour throughout the ordeal.  That’s how I wanted to write it.  I was lucky to be able to do some research at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra one time when I was posted to Navy Office.  I was allowed access to the hand written diaries the Regiment maintained daily from it’s inception in Brisbane, embarkation, soldiering in Malaya and the retreat and final surrender in Singapore.  It was the little snippets that I was interested in – the daily routine; who went on leave with whom; who got punished   Unashamedly, I borrow the rhythm of Masefield’s Fever Chills to try and portray the voice of those poor bastards who embarked on an adventure and got trapped on Singapore.

 

“Tranquil you lie,

      Your knightly virtue proved,

           Your memory hallowed,

                 In the land you loved.”

……..Memorial to 2/10 Field Regiment, Brisbane

1941, Thursday, 20th February         A greaser from the troop ship Queen Mary was found drowned in Singapore harbour.  He had been drinking.

 

E staggered from the Horse Guard Bar

with two of his new found mates,

spat in the gutter and crudely yelled, up the AIF

I gotta get back to the Queen e says,

for Mary’s me home and bed,

so they turned him to port and held up his head

til his eyes stopped lolling about,

then they let him loose and he teetered and rolled

the way that a sailor would,

you’re a greaser they yelled, a greaser from hell,

you’re a bad and evil man,

and the greaser rolled into the night as happy as he could be

 

in the morning they fished a body out

from the harbour of Singapore,

it were Charlie Smith the greaser were he,

and e drank in the Horse Guard Bar.

 

1942, 2nd to 8th February.                   The Japanese subjected the 22^nd Brigade area to an intense artillery barrage.

 

We cowers and our morale is low,

but we’d be alright

if supply could get us more ammo,

them Japs, they

got plenty of ammo, too right,

and they hides and hurls their projies on us

all day and at night,

but there ain’t ammunition enough

for Aussie artillery use.

 

Sarge from ‘is briefing says,

ration the ammo some more,

twelve rounds a day each gun,

to fire at the Japs in Johore,

it’s tough, I know,

but if you’d pull your heads from your backsides,

you’d be better gunners, and find,

it ain’t ammo on what you’s rely,

but there ain’t ammunition enough

for Aussie artillery use.

                              J. O. White

 



 

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.

 

 

Kenneth Slessor - 'Captain Dobbin'.

When it comes to Kenneth Slessor, there's a lot of critique and literary comment on his poem 'Five Bells'.  But I’m not into hidden meaning and oblique reference served up by critics attempting to understand obscure lines.  That’s why I don’t have it as one of my favourite Slessor poems.  If 'Five Bells 'requires such analysis then it will have to wait for me.  Give me a poem that stirs my spirit, but also one that I can understand.  And from Slessor such a poem is his Captain Dobbin (April 1929):

 

Captain Dobbin

Captain Dobbin, having retired from the South Seas

In the dumb tides of 1900, with a handful of shells,

A few poisoned arrows, a cask of pearls,

And five thousand pounds in colonial funds,

Now sails the streets in a brick villa, Laburnum Villa’,

In whose blank windows, the harbour hangs

Like a fog against the glass,

Golden and smoky, or stoned with a white glitter,

And boats go by, suspended in the pane,

Blue Funnel, Red Funnel, Messageries Maritimes,

Lugged down the port like sea-beasts taken alive

That scrape their bellies on sharp sands,

Of which particulars Captain Dobbin keeps

A ledger sticky with ink,

Entries of time and weather, state of the moon,

Nature of cargo and captain’s name,

For some mysterious and awful purpose

Never divulged.

For at night, when the stars mock themselves with lanterns,

So late the chimes blow loud and faint

Like a hand shutting and unshutting over the bells

Captain Dobbin, having observed from bed

The lights, like a great fiery snake, of the Comorin

Going to sea, will note the hour

For subsequent recording in his gazette.

 

I like poems about people.  Different people have a different way of talking, by nature of their race, social status, profession, personality and attitude.  And I love it when a poem captures and creates an accurate linguistic expression of the person.  Captain Dobbin does it for me.  The metre and the voice is a clipped, commanding, in charge, short, somewhat pompous, oh yes a sea captain – from the opening lines you feel you need to straighten your back – this sea captain is a tough nut, doesn’t entertain fools, will cut you no slack, demanding and feared:

Then Captain Dobbin’s eye,

The eye of wild and wispy scudding blue,

Voluptuously prying, would light up

Like mica scratched by gully-suns,

And he would be fearful to look upon,

And shattering in his conversation,

Nor would he tolerate the harmless chanty,

No Shenandoah’, or the dainty mew

That landsmen offer in silver dish

To Neptune, sung to pianos in candlelight.

Of these he spoke in scorn,

For there was but one way of singing ‘Stormalong’,

He said, and that was not really singing,

But howling, rather – shrieked in the wind’s jaws

By furious men, not tinkled in drawing-rooms

By lap-dogs in clean shirts.

Another influence I get from 'Captain Dobbin' is a running together of images, esoteric items, people and place names.  The result is long, fluid passages - no complete sentence stops, but line breaks and commas that make it so easy to read and even recite (a brilliant use of enjambment and caesura):

Over the flat and painted atlas-leaves

His reading-glass would tremble,

Over the fathoms, pricked in tiny rows,

Water shelving to the coast.

Quietly the bone-rimmed lens would float

Till, through the glass, he felt the barbed rush

Of bubbles foaming, spied the ablacores,

The blue-finned admirals, heard the wind-swallowing cries

Of planters running on the beach

Who filched their swags of yams and ambergris,

Bird’s nests and sandalwood, from pastures numbed

By the sun’s yellow, too meek for honest theft;

But he, less delicate robber, climbed the walls,

Broke into dozing houses

Crammed with black bottles, marish wine

Crusty and salt-corroded, fading prints,

Sparkle-daubed almanacs and playing cards,

With rusty cannon, left by the French outside,

Half-buried in sand,

Even to the castle of Queen Pomaree

In the Yankee’s footsteps, and found her throne-room piled

With golden candelabras, mildewed swords,

Guitars and fowling pieces, tossed in heaps

With greasy cakes and flung-down calabashes.
 

And, at these words,

The galleries of photographs, men with rich beards,

Pea-jackets and brass buttons, with folded arms,

Would scowl approval, for they were shipmates, too,

Companions of no cruise by reading-glass,

But fellows of storm and honey from the past –

‘The Charlotte, Java, ’93,’

‘Knuckle and Fred at Port au Prince,’

‘William in his new Rig,’

Even that notorious scoundrel, Captain Baggs,

Who, as all knew, owed Dobbin Twenty Pounds

Lost at fair cribbage, but he never paid,

Or paid ‘with the slack of the tops’l sheets’

As Captain Dobbin frequently expressed it.

 

I haven't included all of 'Captain Dobbin', nor have I written the extracts in order (get a copy of it and see what a brilliant poem it is).  I want to show how I've been influenced by it and Kenneth Slessor.  In writing 'Captain Dobbin', Slessor drew on his experience of knowing an old sailing ship master (may have been a relative of his wife).  He was also influenced by and borrowed terms from Herman Melville's 'Omoo - A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas' (published 1847).  As Slessor was influenced, so too in turn am I influenced and therefore my poem, 'Frederick Johnson'.

1984.  My wife (Linda’s) grandfather, Popsie, lived out his last days in a nursing home in Sydney, the Summer Hill nursing home.  We would visit him on slow Sunday afternoons, Linda, Matthew, the twins.  The home was an old solid built mansion added onto and converted into an aged care ‘home’.  You went up a wide flight of front steps.  Inside was dark and smelly.  Ghosts of old people propped up on hospital service beds stared from bedrooms.  It all seemed regrettable but organised to us casual visitors.  But to those who had to remain there, it was what they knew of as life.  For a man who served in the Royal Navy and survived two world wars it must have been sometimes hard.  Fred Johnson joined the Royal Navy on 24th July 1912.  He was out in Africa in WWI and then in WWII survived the torpedoing of 'HMS Forfar' by the German U-boat, U-99.  He settled in Australia in the 1960's and died in 1984.

Frederick Johnson

Frederick Johnson, Master at arms and ex boy sailor,

Served his nation through two world wars,

North Africa Star, Atlantic campaign, service decoration and bar,

Now serves a tough draft in the Summer Hill Nursing home,

In whose dark passageways the odors of old men,

Hang like mustard gas dead in the air,

And night shades and shadows crawl over walls,

Cast by search beams in the street traffic outside,

Or clouds drifting over the moon, a mariner’s moon,

Illuminating tedious targets in his room,

A bedside vanity table, sanitary pan, one visitor’s chair,

And a washed out print from a European master,

Served as a solemn reminder of another life over there,

London, Abbey Wood, Woolich, Kathleen,

And traveling up from Portsmouth on annual leave.
 

By day the home’s regular routine conducts itself,

As it might in any stone frigate,

With organised bullying behaviour,

An appreciation not entirely lost to the master,

Nor did he think too harsh in it’s handling,

To be taken as anything more,

Than necessary for maintenance of good order and discipline.

But others were there,

Less measured, less tolerant, less accommodating,

Weaker, irritable men who had never lived in a messdeck

Or stood watch,

Or even commissioned to submit to a strong, demanding woman,

And he would dismiss them with scorn,

Calling them waisters and lumps of yammering blubber

Having never learnt or been taught,

The tight-lipped discipline that endurance demands.

Not so the poor buggers in the Irish Sea,

The ones who found themselves,

By some miracle of grace to be still alive,

Clinging to bits of debris covered in furnace fuel oil,

And already losing their teeth to the chattering cold,

Not having any idea of a part they played,

In the destruction of Prien, Schepke or Kretshmer.
 

So Johnson, ever comfortable in the company of men,

Soaked in tradition, charged by duty and ranked in glory,

Waits and witnesses each nights’ raw surrender of honour

Played out in attention seeking cries, moans and cutting demands,

And more intolerable the losing of his own dignity,

Having to be messed around by these young girls,

Even though it was simply being attended to, not trouble

From that one, the little Maltese nurse,

So he closes his eyes and is adrift,

In the winter of 40, the Viscount, silhouettes, ships in convoy,

Forfar with her messdecks decorated for Christmas,

Menus for the celebration dinner and concert programs,

Organised and properly printed,

For he knew something of morale

How important it was for the lads, were they back at home,

And deep male voices solemnly sang Silent Night, Holy Night

Deep down below in the bowels of the ship,

Where the prayer wrapped in it’s cold steel cocoon,

Watches and waits for each night’s uncertainty.
 

Silently in his room,

In his cold space of impersonal possessions,

Without hope finally, of ever returning home, 

Frederick Johnson gently drifts into that good night.

                                                                                                            J.O. White