Hilton Head Island: two poems by Edward Arlington Robinson

As regular readers know that on land or at sea I read some ancient Chinese or Japanese poetry and some, usually more recent Western poetry, every morning, and I listen to some Bach every day. You could do worse.

Of the poetry, I often reread anthologies, and I often find in doing so that I am struck by poems that I had read before but never quite appreciated.  Perhaps my mind wandered.

In rereading an anthology dating from 1921, which included many poets now forgotten, I was struck—and that is the right word—by poems by Edward Arlington Robinson, of whom I had known but not fully appreciated, so I sought and bought a Kindle version of his poems, which have become at present my morning Western reading.  He is an original and admirable poet.

His best known poem is ‘Richard Cory’, perhaps influenced by his own brother’s suicide.

But I have found many of his poems to be exceptional.  He was a great, intelligent and subtle poet.

You may understand why I particularly like this one, whose title comes from what was said by the Greek soldiers who escaped as part of the ten thousand under Xenophon in ancient Greek history when they saw the sea.

Perhaps I can be forgiven for comparing one of my own poems which you will find in GANNET 6 if you read it and for my noting that I have experienced ‘the roaring of the Horn’, which Robinson only imagined.  I respect that he did.

‘Soon’ is relative.  I was thirty-nine when I wrote those words on CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE.  I sailed off Arnhem Land again in RESURGAM in 1987, in 2008 in THE HAWKE OF TUONELA, and in 2016 in GANNET.  Now, soon to be eighty-five, soon is soon.