This is a volume of poetry by Charles Godfrey Leland. The first half of this volume is taken up by the Songs of the Sea, with rather romantic songs about seafaring, mermaids, and adventures, and the second half of the volume contains the Lays of the Land, with poems focused on the things a seaman may encounter when he enters a port.
By : Charles Godfrey Leland (1824 - 1903)
|
Among the songs in this collection are the Brand New Ballads already known more or less to the public, several of them having an American newspaper circulation, while a few are given at times in public readings; since I have learned, for example, that “In Nevada” was one of the stock-pieces of Mr. Clifford Harrison. They now reappear amended and with additions.
In the “Songs of the Sea” the reader will not fail to observe that three or four, such as the “Mermaid” and “Time for Us to Go,” are not by me at all. They are sailors’ songs of the olden time, introduced as suggestions for other lyrics, as I have indeed declared in the text, and also to aid in the main purpose or idea which inspires the whole collection—they being in this respect like stones from more ancient edifices built into new houses, as was the wont of men in the middle age.
This main purpose was to set forth with scrupulous care, as of a statue photographed from many sides, the mariner of the sailing—not steaming—ship, who is now rapidly passing away, although some tens of thousands of the species are still to be found in the remoter routes of travel. This kind of man should be interesting, because he is almost the only one who is drawn into his calling by a desire to rove about the world and lead an adventurous, reckless, manly life. Into this life entered, I may say, as “vitalising elements,” “shipwrecks and disasters of the sea,” the extremes of discipline and dissipation, as well as those of cynical scepticism and superstition, the seeing, like Ulysses, cities and men, and the consciousness, so clear to undeveloped minds and smaller natures, of belonging to a “peculiar” class. This I have borne in mind most earnestly, and those who perceive it will also find that in this spirit the following notes and sketches in song illustrate, I trust accurately, a consistent ideal text, and that all the songs unite to form a single poem.
As for the many scraps, “chanties,” choruses, sayings, similes, and bits of sea-lore worked up into the lyrics here and there, I make no attempt whatever to indicate what is borrowed; all that I can say of it is, that if the mere gathering the stones is all the merit of making a mosaic picture (as many seem to think), then I could claim little merit for originality. But as this is not a folk-lore book, in which a writer is held sternly accountable “to give authority for every word,” and as a mass of notes would have simply defeated the whole aim of the book, I have preferred making myself amenable to the charge of plagiarism to boring my reader—even as an Italian devoted servant of whom I once heard, preferred to be carried off by the police, on the charge of stealing oranges, rather than awaken and disturb his master who could have explained the matter. I can, however, truly say that as regards ideas, incidents, tales, turns of speech and idioms, current sayings, and so on, from poetry down to vulgarity, I have literally taken so much from sailors themselves that the work, if analysed, would be a curiosity of collocation, like the poems made up entirely of proverbs, or the Sermon of Texts.
Here I would mention my obligation to more than one ancient mariner, and specially to my old friend, Captain Stead, now so long a dweller at the Langham Hotel, for advising about, and revising, these ballads. These friends having carefully studied the work and corrected or modelled its every sentence into ship-shape, have been kind enough to assure me that it would hold its own in the forecastle, as a real thing, and not an imitation; which saying uttered in sooth and truth especially by a friend of forty years’ experience in sailing-vessels, mostly “before the war,” was to me greatly encouraging.
What I have above written of the “Songs of the Sea” is equally true of the other ballads in this volume. They also form a series of eccentric pictures of American life after the war, brought together, not like chance pictures in a scrap-book, but as I before said, to carry out one idea in reference to a special subject. In this spirit and to this end were they written, from current prose tales. Nor have I ever forgotten that there is in them for the future a kind of folk-lore which is never so apparent to those who live in it as to those who inherit it. When I was a small boy, there was in my aunt’s kitchen in Milford, Massachusetts, a cheese-knife, which had no special interest to anybody save to me, because it had been the very sword carried by General Eaton in his famous march over the Desert to attack Algiers. Nowadays it would be greatly prized. So it is sometimes worth while to think of these things which we now possess, and how rapidly they are hastening to become curiosities—I myself having lived to see every object familiar to me in youth become bric-à-brac. In the last age, everything not in the newest fashion was despised—in this there is a highly-cultured class just beginning to show itself beyond the Realists and disciples of Mental-analytical Chemistry, who look alternately at the Past and Future,
Even as Janus on the Capitol
Saw all that was or ever yet would be.
There may be a few among the jealous guardians or spokes around the Hub who may demand by what right I invade the sacred precincts of Boston, and sing about its past. Well, my boyhood was half passed in Boston or near it; there the romance of sailor life, which was marvellous in those times, imbued me, and then and there in common with my mates I devoured the Mariners’ Chronicle, Shipwrecks and Disasters of the Sea, Lives of the Buccaneers, and listened with avidity to the tales of those who had been on the briny deep. Nearly all my first-cousins had at one time or other run away and gone to sea or taken long voyages. Among the former were Benjamin Stimson, the “S” of Two Years Before the Mast; Charles Leland, who afterwards grew like Samuel Jackson to the height of seven feet; and Samuel Godfrey. From these and many more I learned an incredible number of sea stories and songs, none of which I ever forgot, being to an extraordinary degree accustomed to keep repeating to myself these “stranger legends of the olden time.” Hence it comes that I have in my mind such vivid memories of the old North End of Boston.
I would say in conclusion what will be apparent enough to many, that these Ballads make no great pretence to be poetry. They consist of incidents or small “motives” cast into rhyme or measure, as the easiest method of giving them a certain value, just as a tune brings out a song. Most rhymers are criticised more or less severely for pretending to be poets; all that I can claim for this volume is, that it is a kind of collection of curiosities which, as they have seemed to me to be worth remembering, will, I trust, be regarded by others as worth reading.
Comments
Post a Comment