Verses and Sonnets

Chapter 7: THE HARBOUR.

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About This Book

This collection assembles sonnets, short lyrics, grotesques and epigrams that shift between playful satire and serious meditation. Poems evoke nocturnal reverie, pastoral songs, seasonal sonnets for each month, and compact narrative sketches, while recurring themes include youth and ageing, love and honour, music and faith, mortality and urban poverty. Formal variety—from polished sonnet sequences to biting epigrams—allows intimate love poems to sit beside comic portraits and moral reflections, producing a compact, varied lyrical volume that alternates tenderness, irony, and moral urgency across domestic, religious, and public scenes.

THE HARBOUR.

I was like one who grips the deck by night,

Bearing the tiller up against his breast;

I was like one who makes with all his might

For keeping course although so hardly prest;

Who veers with veering shock, now east, now west,

And strains his foothold still, and still makes play,

Of bending beams until the sacred light

Shows him high lands and heralds up the day.

But now such busy work of battle past,

I am like one whose barque at bar at last

Comes hardly heeling down the adventurous breeze,

And entering calmer seas,

I am like one that brings his merchandise

To Californian skies.