The poetry of romantic and economic man.(Cargoes by John Masefield)

JOHN MASEFIELD'S "Cargoes" is a very fine poem, packing an enormous amount of imagery and atmosphere into eighty-seven words. It is clear, vivid and immediate, and has been deservedly enshrined as a classic and repeatedly anthologised:

 
   Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir, 
   Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine, 
   With a cargo of ivory, 
   And apes and peacocks, 
   Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet 
      white wine. 
 
   Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus, 
   Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green 
      shores, 
   With a cargo of diamonds, 
   Emeralds, amethysts, 
   Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores. 
 
   Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack, 
   Butting through the Channel in the mad March days, 
   With a cargo of Tyne coal, 
   Road-rails, pig-lead, 
   Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays. 

Descriptive writing doesn't get much better than that. Close your eyes and, if you have the smallest spark of poetry in your soul, you can see them all. At first glance the poem's contents and point seem very simple: a nostalgic evocation of the romantic and gorgeous past as compared to the unromantic and unattractive present (in a way, not unlike T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land in mood). This is how it has tended to be presented to generations of schoolchildren. However, on closer reading certain complexities and ambiguities are to be found. This little poem is by no means as simple as it seems.

The passage of the first two ships, the quinquireme "rowing home to haven" and the stately Spanish galleon "dipping through the tropics" seems apparently effortless, comfortable, and in harmony with the natural order of things, compared to the dirty British coaster "butting through the Channel". The adjectives of the third stanza are filled with negative associations: dirty, butting, mad, pig, cheap, even salt-caked. There are no such negatively-loaded words in the first two stanzas, where the adjectives sunny, sweet, stately, palm-green are all more or less positive and bespeak tranquillity. The same contrast is present in the verbs: rowing, dipping, butting.

The quinquireme in this poem is like a dream: we do not know if quinquiremes, that is, ships rowed by five banks of oars, ever actually existed, and if they did they would have been warships. The location of Ophir is also doubtful. Nineveh and Palestine together can be seen as anachronistic.

It is dream-like in another way as well: in reality, if the British coaster is "dirty" it is a pretty safe bet that the quinquireme was a lot dirtier. It would (if it existed) have been rowed, in all probability, by slaves, and slaverowed galleys, with their excrement-filled bilges, could be smelt before they could be seen over the horizon, a fact remarked upon even by the none-too-fastidious mariners of other ships.

The stately Spanish galleon would probably not be a lot better as far as cleanliness went. The Dutch vessel Batavia, very similar to a Spanish galleon, wrecked in 1629, was excavated off the coast of Western Australia not long ago. It was found that the excrement filling the bilges had, in 350 years under the sea, solidified into a tarry mass which had preserved various artefacts that had fallen into it, as well as undigested scraps of food which had passed through the passengers' alimentary canals. All this was very rewarding for latter-day scientists and archaeologists, but it also suggested that such ships were not exactly temples of hygiene. The dirty British coaster is probably a great deal cleaner, even if its paint is flaking and the smoke-stack needs a scrub.