A Review of an Epic-length, Unpublished Masterpiece by the English poet, Nick Moore
Nick Moore has long been one of my favorite poets. He’s one of the few poets I personally know that has spent the years necessary to write epic-length poems. I first got to know him at wonderful blog, https://gonecyclingagain.wordpress.com/ that contains a plethora of traditional verse, especially sonnets. Not too long ago he sent me a long, unpublished poem, that I have written about below. Nick has not published the poem, though he ought to. Still, I wanted to note in fourwindowspress.com that there is a wonderful poem that needs to see the light of day.
When I first started reading Nick Moore’s long poem, Thought Ship, written in the ancient Anglo-Saxon alliterative form that is rarely attempted by contemporary poets, the first thing that came into my head was an experience that had happened several years ago at the Dickenson Poetry Series in Ephraim, Wisconsin. Ethel Mortenson Davis, my poet-artist wife, and I have made an attempt to attend the Dickenson series for years, enjoying the company of Door County poets and listening to their latest work during the open mike sessions.
On this occasion my offering for the evening had been a poem using the Celtic form of the Droigneach, one of the more challenging forms ever created where lines are 9 to 13 syllables long, alliteration is spilled throughout the poem, and the last word of every line has three lines. In the form that I had used that night I had also followed the pattern of using triple syllabic rhymes. After reading the poem I gave a detailed explanation of the rules I’d used to write the poem.
When the evening was over, and the poets gathered to share a glass of juice or wine and snack on delicacies spread out on a table covered with an elegant tablecloth, one of the best poets there came up to me, shaking her head. There is no doubt in my mind that this is one of the best poets in a county filled with admirable poets, but she told me, “I don’t know why you bother with all of that form stuff. It’s more like torture than poetry.”
In contemporary poetry, of course, a work like Thought Ship is an anomaly. The Anglo-Saxon alliterative form, or Old English metre, he uses to write the poem dates back to the time of Beowulf, the epic master work of that era, and earlier into ancient German and Norse poetry. The specific form Moore uses in his poem, as he said in an email to me about the poem, is made up of “two half-lines with a caesura, which I’ve emphasized with the two-column format. The alliteration should fall on the first and/or second stressed syllables of the first half -line, and the first stressed syllable of the second half-line; the fourth syllable can do whatever it pleases.”[1]
I can imagine a contemporary reader, coming up on the poem for the first time, would automatically shake their head at all of this and say, this is more like torture than poetry. Making the challenge of reading the poem even more uncomfortable is Moore’s use of Old English, “ān, tƿēġen,” etc. in the headings for each stanza of a 9,000+ word poem. Contemporary poets rarely reach back into the history of poetry and so nakedly integrate ancient language into a current poem.
Then there is this ancient convention of placing lines into commons so that the poem can be read horizontally or diagonally:
So. Send for the shipwright Summon him hither
The flood-tide is flowing Deep forces are stirring
I bring a commission A craft like no other.
A thing never dreamed of: Thought-Ship, I name her;
My own and mine only With magic all through her
Swift-sailing and shapely A sea-sword, a wave-shield
To brave storms and bear me Beyond this day’s troubles
Far out on the ocean Safe over rough waters.
The craft of a production like this seems a challenge, to the least, and requires a discipline that makes little sense in a world where the moment is key, where business is more concerned with today’s performance and the quarterly report than any consideration of long-term prospects.
Most, though not all, contemporary poetry is shaped around stories of moments or the dynamics of relationships, usually, but not always, between individuals. Power is often derived from disparate images drawn from moments, confessional histories, or acts within relationships, causing a fusion of image, symbol, emotion, and idea that explodes into meanings that seem larger, and more significant, than the content of the poem. The poet who commented on my effort at a droigneach is a master of this contemporary approach to poetry.
Moore, of course, is pursuing something dramatically different. This pursuit is part of what makes his poem important and should interest the most contemporary of readers.
One of C.S. Lewis’s favorite poems was The Fairie Queen by Edmund Spenser, the great epicist writing during the reign of Queen Elizabeth in England. Spenser’s poem used language that was archaic for the times in which he lived and was based upon the great Arthurian and classical tales drawn from what was considered antiquity. Lewis’s reaction to great poem was that what Spenser
. . . had always liked was the Middle Ages as he imagined them to have been and as they survived in his time in the pageant, the morality play, and the metrical romance. . . [thus] he was enabled to produce a tale more solemn, more redolent of the past, more venerable, than any real medieval romance—to deny, in his own person, the breach between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance . . .[2]
What I take from Lewis’s analysis is that sometimes poets can reach back into the past, using both language as well as form, to enrich a poem told to a contemporary audience. Part of the sense here is that time is not a static quality that exists only at the moment when the poet sits down to write a poem. It is, as many poets have written in many ages, an ever-flowing river as large as the universe that has places in its flowing that can be noted but is inexorable in its force toward an unseeable eternity. By looking backward, taking the language and poetic forms of another time, Spenser, as Lewis notes, is “enabled to produce” a poem “more solemn, more redolent of the past, more venerable” than the model, in Spenser’s case “medieval romance,” from which it is drawn.
In his great poem, “The Seafarer,” Ezra Pound, a more modern poet, uses the same form of Old English metre used in Thought Ship, but does not use the two-column format. Using a model from an older Old English poem of the same title, Pound also uses, like Spenser before him, some of the diction from the original poem. The result, as is true of The Fairie Queen, is a powerful poem that exists in the context of Pound’s time, but achieves a timelessness that gives some sense of the time-river’s inexorable flow through time:
May I for my own self song’s truth reckon,
Journey’s jargon, how I in harsh days
Hardship endured oft.
Bitter breast-cares have I abided,
Known on my keel many a care’s hold,
And dire sea-surge, and there I oft spent
Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship’s head
While she tossed close to cliffs. Coldly afflicted,
My feet were by frost benumbed.[3]
Interestingly, as in The Faery Queen, Pound uses the syntax of ancient times to help heighten the sense that his poem is bringing an ancient man’s experience into a contemporary world that will also be the past as the ship the seafarer is on keeps sailing.
The reason a contemporary poet uses old, or even ancient, forms for writing a poem is not simply to show off their learning or their technical expertise. Part of the effort comes from a sense that poetry is part craft and part art and that by mastering old forms you are paying homage to a history that has been part of humanity’s development of distinct cultures across the ages. But there is also this other part, the one that has to do with what Spenser and Pound were tapping into in order to achieve a poetic power that is different from that achieved by the poetry of moment and relationship. This is an attempt to reach back through time in both craft and art to produce an art that “is more solemn, more redolent of the past, more venerable” than what can be produced out of simply writing out of the present using the craft accessible to readers contemporary with the poet.
This sense of the time-river is central to what makes Thought Ship worth reading by contemporary readers. Moore is not only showing technical mastery of an ancient craft, but he is using that craft to fashion a long work forged by a poet sailing from that past into his contemporary world. He is attempting to find power in the layering of time that has built up into what is now the present, but which will, quickly enough, become the past, and he is attempting this via a “thought ship” engendered out of his reactions and complex of anxieties that help make up his every-days.
The poem itself is broken into four parts: The Building of the Thought-Ship, The Voyages of the Thought-Ship, the Sword and the Summons, and then, finally, The Last Voyage of the Thought-Ship. In the third stanza, þrēo, Moore specifically tells the reader why is building the thought-ship:
Place charms upon her The power of the ancients
Runes of protection Written in silver
Spells and enchantments Spoken around her
Granting good fortune Guards against ill fate.
Another way of putting this is to say that he is constructing a magic poem designed to conjure the power of the ancients to create, as he says, “Runes of protection/Spells and enchantments” in the hope of “good fortune.”
Once the ship is built it then sets sail upon a series of voyages. Each voyage explores different aspects of the natural world as it exists both in the contemporary world and the ancient. The kingdom of the birds, high, cold lands, a place where horses predominate, in the company of the wily Reynard, in forests, among farms and fields, upon the waters of the world, and the seasons of the year are also explored. Through each exploration lessons are learned, attempting to fulfill what Spenser would have said is the purpose of poetry, creating lessons of moral truth through images of great beauty.[4]
These initial voyages of the thought-ship end, leading to a time of waiting and trying to understand the real purpose behind the effort to build the ship:
The months passed in peace I lay, patient but watchful
Awaiting the order My ordained task still unknown.
I sought solace in silence Solitude and reflection
Looked deep to discern My direction and destiny
But no road was revealed I was rootless and restless
No work and no will My word-hoard neglected.
In this period the poets prepares for a battle that he senses on the horizon, but does not really understand. Who is the enemy? “These phantoms and torments. . .” He has built the thought-ship, journeyed, but he faces an unknown, unknowable future. Inside this time between journey and battle, even his “word-hoard,” his life as a poet, is neglected.
After a time or preparation, worry, and even fear, the last voyage of the thought-ship at last comes:
When all is lost, nothing left. I will lay down my weapons.
I will tell one more tale Then take my last leaving.
Bear me then, Thought-Ship Beyond the world’s far rim
Set sail for the islands. Steer by the first star.
Inside this last section the angst felt by individual living in the contemporary world of the poet leaks into the poem and gives the rationale for the poem’s existence, ending the thought-ships voyage with the revelations generated from a poet’s craft voyage through time.
There are large themes throughout Thought Ship. Whether your read the lines vertically or horizontally, the poet is struggling with time and himself, but time is felt in the natural world of nature where the kingdom of birds, wisdom of horses, secret of trees, the farms and fields, the world’s waters are eternal. But there is also the theme of journey and self inside journey and how that self, waiting for a battle with the unseen forces in his psyche, survives in a world that is not “Set apart from the struggle.”
In the end we all sail upon our own Thought-ship “Out of time, place and memory.” We are all living “Through long, nameless ages.”
[1] January 10, 2021.
[2] Lewis, C.S. “On Reading The Faerie Queene.” IN: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Collected by Walter Hooper. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966, 1998, p. 148.
[3] Quoted from Poetry Foundation, “The Seafarer by Ezra Pound,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44917/the-seafarer. Accessed on 1/16/21.
[4] Wendling, Susan. “The Fairy Way of Writing, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and C.S. Lewis’s “Habit of Mind,” Inklings Forever, Volume IX, 9 (2014). Accessed at www.taylor.edu/cslewis on 1/16/21.
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