The Stoker
While a student at college, I voyaged to Naples in the steerage of an Italian liner. That was long before the days of the modern oil burner and the engine room was a fair reproduction of Dante’s Inferno. One afternoon a young stoker, begrimed and perspiring, crept up the iron ladder from the stoke hold and sat for a few minutes gazing out of an open port. His wistful face remains a vivid memory and occasioned the following lines.
Framed in the iron port there looms a face
That Rembrandt’s stilus or the sombre muse
Of Dante might have etched. Pale cheeks and eyes
That gaze unseeing, out - a forehead damp
With sweat and smeared with grime - a haunting face
Through which there peers in wistful apathy
A parched and withered soul. Some stoker crept,
Gasping for air up from that hell below,
Of lurid fires and gloom, where engines groan
Like blinded Titans, and with giant strength
Shoulder the huge hulk forward through the brine.
What thoughts beguile the furrows of that brow
Does he perchance, recall the sunlit days
Of childhood in some cottage gay with flowers
Where Italy, enthroned among her rocks
Broods o’er her vanished grandeur? Does the spell
Of romance conjure up the golden past
When his proud forbears bore the pomp of Rome
To seas remote, when Roman legions ruled
The servile world? Did he in flaunting crest,
And burnished armour tread the galley deck?
Or did a scourging destiny condemn
His pain wracked shoulders to the oaken oar?
To his dulled ears float strains of music sweet
From gilded cabins where the zest of life
Enthralls the voyagers, while his the hand
That drives the moving palace on her course
Through seas of shimmering light. A gnome begrimed,
Breathing foul dust and blistered by the heat
In caverns far below. A galley slave
Heaving and straining at a deadlier oar -
An iron bar that burns the calloused palm.
Whene’er the furnace gapes its dragon jaws
And blasts him with its breath, with reckless hand
He flings his youth into that Moloch’s maw!
And his reward? O bargain infamous
A mess of pottage for a birth right riven
Like Esau’s ancient sin. Repulsive fare
A stinking hole to kennel like a cur
Battling with vermin, foul and desperate
Too bitter punishment for branded crime.
Chained by the manacles of circumstance
To Vulcan’s smoking forge, a fate more dire
Than once befell Prometheus wracked upon
His cross of crags on grizzled Caucausus;
With every shovel speed the winged hours
His hopes, his dreams, his life but sordid lumps
Of coal to feed those flames insatiate.
Then Death, the pitiful, brings welcome rest.
His body, warped and shrivelled, slides adown
The tilted hatchway, weighted at the feet
A burned out clinker cast into the sea!