I was shipmates with Sorrow in a day gone by;
We shared the wheel and look-out, old Sorrow and I:
Good times and bad times, foul weather and fair,
The old grey face of him was always there.
There was never shanty raised there, never song I heard,
But his voice would be in it like a crying bird;
I was dull in the dog watches when the laugh went free
Because of old Sorrow sitting down by me.
I thought I could lose him in the stir and change
Of bright wicked cities all sunlit and strange;
There came a hand at my elbow and a voice in my ear —
It was patient Sorrow saying: "Lad, I'm here!"
And by the bustling harbour, up the busy street,
Many a time I see him, many a time I meet
The old grey face there of one I used to know . . .
And it's old shipmate Sorrow out of long ago.
And the watch at the halliards, they may sing with a will,
But the voice I used to hear, oh I think I hear it still,
Like the wind in a shroud piping, or a seabird's cry . . .
And it's old Sorrow singing out of times gone by!
Notes
From SEA SONGS AND BALLADS 1917-22, edited by Cicely Fox Smith, published by Houghton Mifflin Co., New York, US, © 1924, pp. 116-117. First published in the same form in RHYMES OF THE RED ENSIGN, Hodder & Stoughton, © 1919, pp. 65-66.
It took me some time to decode this poem. It now seems to be more than a general lament for a lost shipmate. It may represent the poet's loss of a close personal friend, her shipmate Dan who was also a shantysinger, a loss which continued to haunt her even after returning to England. In this poem she seems reconciled to the haunting, and to even welcome it.
Charley Noble
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Comments
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Sailors, like most of us, would give each other names and this is what I believe has happened here. A lugubrious sailor would readily gain the nick-name Sorrow even if his personality didn't merit it.
A particularly close friend imprints himself on ones memory and one often sees echoes of that person in others that you meet, especially in similar circumstances.
I think Fox Smith has done an excellent job of capturing and recording such feelings.
Jim Saville
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