Ronald A Hopwood

Here is a forward by Alfred Noyes for the 1951 edition of THE LAWS OF THE NAVY: 39 Poems by Admiral Ronald Hopwood:

THIRTY-FOUR YEARS AGO in the middle of the first World War, not long after the Battle of Jutland, The Times did a very remarkable thing: it published and "featured" a poem of no less than ten eight-line stanzas. This poem, The Old Way, by Admiral Hopwood, breathed the very spirit of the great sea tradition of England. It stirred all those who read it, in that momentous time, as if they had actually seen the famous fighting ships of English history, in their harbour beyond the setting sun, when

... the breeze has spoken strangers, with a stirring tale to tell,
And a thousand eager voices flung the challenge out to sea:
"Come they hither in the old way, in the only way that's free?"
And the flying Breeze called softly: "In the old way . . ."

Various generations of the old ships put the same question to the new arrivals from the twentieth-century war, and received the same answer. The enemy might have been victor

"Still - he hurried into harbour - in the old way -"

This poem indeed is something very much more than topical; it is filled with the life-breath of all that is best in the character of those who go down to the sea in ships - patience, resolution, loyalty, self-discipline and complete sincerity. It ends with a symbolic passage of great beauty, in which the silver trumpets are heard sounding on the other side:

"Did you voyage all unspoken, small and lonely?
Or with fame, the happy fortune of the few?
So you win the Golden Harbour, in the old way,
There's the old sea welcome waiting there for you."

I have dwelt on this poem in particular because I feel that it sets the keynote. I have not the slightest doubt that this book is of permanent value to our literature; and there is no other book of sea poetry quite like it. Ships and the ocean-sea are the main burden throughout. The manner is of the author's own generation, and the matter is timeless. Steeped in the history of the British Navy through the centuries, they speak of something which may be called, quite simply, the soul of England, something that has saved her from a thousand perils in the past and is her only safeguard for the future. Behind the romance and pageantry of the ships there is a deep sense of a power that shapes and controls the events of history. Nobody who knew Ronald Hopwood could forget the sheer sincerity of his belief that behind our apparently chaotic world there is a purpose and a profound spiritual order. There is a sense of this in the lightest as in the most serious of his poems, and it is good to remember that so true a representative of the great sea tradition of our country could look forward to a time when earth should find a lasting peace. His favourite line in English poetry, he told me once, was one in which that hope seems to be expressed in the very voice of the sea itself:

Universal ocean, softly washing all her warless isles.

The music of that line must often have come into his mind in quiet hours at sea. To that universal ocean, the symbol of God's peace, his ashes were consigned after his death, and in these poems of the sea, for those who loved him, he still speaks to us.