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Kenneth Slessor - Captain Dobbin
Work rating: Low

CAPTAIN Dobbin, having retired from the South Seas 
 In the dumb tides of , with a handful of shells, 
 A few poisoned arrows, a cask of pearls, 
 And five thousand pounds in the colonial funds, 
 Now sails the street in a brick villa, "Laburnum Villa", 
 In whose blank windows the harbour hangs 
 Like a fog against the glass, 
 Golden and smoky, or stoned with a white glitter, 
 And boats go by, suspended in the pane, 
 Blue Funnel, Red Funnel, Messageries Maritimes, 
 Lugged down the port like sea-beasts taken alive 
 That scrape their bellies on sharp sands, 
 Of which particulars Captain Dobbin keeps 
 A ledger sticky with ink, 
 Entries of time and weather, state of the moon, 
 Nature of cargo and captain`s name, 
 For some mysterious and awful purpose 
 Never divulged. 
 For at night, when the stars mock themselves with lanterns, 
 So late the chimes blow loud and faint 
 Like a hand shutting and unshutting over the bells, 
 Captain Dobbin, having observed from bed 
 The lights, like a great fiery snake, of the Comorin 
 Going to sea, will note the hour 
 For subsequent recording in his gazette. 
 But the sea is really closer to him than this, 
 Closer to him than a dead, lovely woman, 
 For he keeps bits of it, like old letters, 
 Salt tied up in bundles 
 Or pressed flat, 
 What you might call a lock of the sea`s hair, 
 So Captain Dobbin keeps his dwarfed memento, 
 His urn-burial, a chest of mummied waves, 
 Gales fixed in print, and the sweet dangerous countries 
 Of shark and casuarina-tree, 
 Stolen and put in coloured maps, 
 Like a flask of seawater, or a bottled ship, 
 A schooner caught in a glass bottle; 
 But Captain Dobbin keeps them in books, 
 Crags of varnished leather 
 Pimply with gilt, by learned mariners 
 And masters of hydrostatics, or the childish tales 
 Of simple heroes, taken by Turks or dropsy. 
 So nightly he sails from shelf to shelf 
 Or to the quadrants, dangling with rusty screws, 
 Or the hanging-gardens of old charts, 
 So old they bear the authentic protractor-lines, 
 Traced in faint ink, as fine as Chinese hairs. 
 Over the flat and painted atlas-leaves 
 His reading-glass would tremble, 
 Over the fathoms, pricked in tiny rows, 
 Water shelving to the coast. 
 Quietly the bone-rimmed lens would float 
 Till, through the glass, he felt the barbèd rush 
 Of bubbles foaming, spied the albicores, 
 The blue-fined admirals, heard the wind-swallowed cries 
 Of planters running on the beach 
 Who filched their swags of yams and ambergris, 
 Birds` nests and sandalwood, from pastures numbed 
 By the sun`s yellow, too meek for honest theft; 
 But he, less delicate robber, climbed the walls, 
 Broke into dozing houses 
 Crammed with black bottles, marish wine 
 Crusty and salt-corroded, fading prints, 
 Sparkle-daubed almanacs and playing cards, 
 With rusty cannon, left by the French outside, 
 Half-buried in sand,
 Even to the castle of Queen Pomaree 
 In the Yankee`s footsteps, and found her throne-room piled 
 With golden candelabras, mildewed swords, 
 Guitars and fowling-pieces, tossed in heaps 
 With greasy cakes and flung-down calabashes. 
 Then Captain Dobbin`s eye, 
 That eye of wild and wispy scudding blue, 
 Voluptuously prying, would light up 
 Like mica scratched by gully-suns, 
 And he would be fearful to look upon 
 And shattering in his conversation; 
 Nor would he tolerate the harmless chanty, 
 No "Shenandoah", or the dainty mew 
 That landsmen offer in a silver dish 
 To Neptune, sung to pianos in candlelight. 
 Of these he spoke in scorn, 
 For there was but one way of singing "Stormalong", 
 He said, and that was not really singing, 
 But howling, rather—shrieked in the wind`s jaws 
 By furious men; not tinkled in drawing-rooms 
 By lap-dogs in clean shirts. 
 And, at these words, 
 The galleries of photographs, men with rich beards, 
 Pea-jackets and brass buttons, with folded arms, 
 Would scowl approval, for they were shipmates, too, 
 Companions of no cruise by reading-glass, 
 But fellows of storm and honey from the past— 
 "The Charlotte, Java, `," 
 "Knuckle and Fred at Port au Prince," 
 "William in his New Rig," 
 Even that notorious scoundrel, Captain Baggs, 
 Who, as all knew, owed Dobbin Twenty Pounds 
 Lost at fair cribbage, but he never paid, 
 Or paid "with the slack of the tops`l sheets" 
 As Captain Dobbin frequently expressed it. 
 There were their faces, grilled a trifle now, 
 Cigar-hued in various spots 
 By the brown breath of sodium-eating years, 
 On quarter-decks long burnt to the water`s edge, 
 A resurrection of the dead by chemicals. 
 And the voyages they had made, 
 Their labours in a country of water, 
 Were they not marked by inadequate lines 
 On charts tied up like skins in a rack? 
 Or his own Odysseys, his lonely travels, 
 His trading days, an autobiography 
 Of angles and triangles and lozenges 
 Ruled tack by tack across the sheet, 
 That with a single scratch expressed the stars, 
 Merak and Alamak and Alpherat, 
 The wind, the moon, the sun, the clambering sea, 
 Sails bleached with light, salt in the eyes, 
 Bamboos and Tahiti oranges, 
 From some forgotten countless day, 
 One foundered day from a forgotten month, 
 A year sucked quietly from the blood, 
 Dead with the rest, remembered by no more 
 Than a scratch on a dry chart— 
 Or when the return grew too choking bitter-sweet 
 And laburnum-berries manifestly tossed 
 Beyond the window, not the fabulous leaves 
 Of Hotoo or canoe-tree or palmetto, 
 There were the wanderings of other keels, 
 Magellan, Bougainville and Cook, 
 Who found no greater a memorial 
 Than footprints over a lithograph. 
 For Cook he worshipped, that captain with the sad 
 And fine white face, who never lost a man 
 Or flinched a peril; and of Bougainville 
 He spoke with graceful courtesy, as a rival
 To whom the honours of the hunting-field 
 Must be accorded. Not so with the Spaniard, 
 Sebastian Juan del Cano, at whom he sneered 
 Openly, calling him a fool of fortune 
 Blown to a sailors` abbey by chance winds 
 And blindfold currents, who slept in a fine cabin, 
 Blundered through five degrees of latitude, 
 Was bullied by mutineers a hundred more, 
 And woke and found himself across the world. 
 Coldly in the window, 
 Like a fog rubbed up and down the glass 
 The harbour, bony with mist 
 And ropes of water, glittered; and the blind tide 
 That crawls it knows not where, nor for what gain, 
 Pushed its drowned shoulders against the wheel, 
 Against the wheel of the mill. 
 Flowers rocked far down 
 And white, dead bodies that were anchored there 
 In marshes of spent light. 
 Blue Funnel, Red Funnel, 
 The ships went over them, and bells in engine-rooms 
 Cried to their bowels of flaring oil, 
 And stokers groaned and sweated with burnt skins, 
 Clawed to their shovels. 
 But quietly in his room, 
 In his little cemetery of sweet essences 
 With fond memorial-stones and lines of grace, 
 Captain Dobbin went on reading about the sea.
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