Friday, August 08, 2003

 
Light Verse For The Beach

Or: Sittin’ Unemployed On The Dock Of The Commie-Controlled Quay

Those Cornerites who, er, linked at the chance to read something by or about the *other* Arnold, might like “Home Is the Sailor” by A.E.Housman. A lesser work, this Phililistine supposes, than “Dover Beach,” although the line, “The ship pours shining on the quay -The plunder of the world” ain’t bad. Odd word, “quay,” but the Reader won’t be insulted here with lame or peg-legged puns about sailors just wanting to get “quayed,” or by the suggestion that those driven to promiscuity by lack of a civil union might wish to get “randy.” Nor will this be followed by a strained reference to Mr. Quaid as “Cousin Eddy” in the National Lampoon “Vacation” series or a stoopid segue into the National Lampoon Radio Hour’s “California Show” which ended with the “Thompson S. Hunter” character finally getting his angle on an overdue piece for Rolling Stone magazine on California: he *hated* the State-even to the point of loathing, if not fearing, the Pacific Ocean as it, if memory serves, “slobbered on the beach.” Nope, won’t mention that bit, broadcast during the era of “the staggering Nixon news,” because “THAT WOULD BE WRONG.” And I wouldn’t even hallucinate about putting words from that Namer Of Names, Elia Kazan (“On The Waterfront”), into the mouth of Anthony Hecht’s “Matthew Arnold” of “The Dover Bitch”: “IT‘S NOT MY NIGHT?!?”

Home Is the Sailor

Home is the sailor, home from the sea:
Her far-borne canvas furled
The ship pours shining on the quay
The plunder of the world.

Home is the hunter from the hill:
Fast in the boundless snare
All flesh lies taken at his will
And every fowl of air.

‘Tis evening on the moorland free,
The starlit wave is still:
Home is the sailor from the sea,
The hunter from the hill.


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