A Grey Day
Grey drizzling mists the moorlands drape,
Rain whitens the dead sea,
From headland dim to sullen cape
Grey sails creep wearily.
I know not how that merchantman
Has found the heart; but ’t is her plan
Seaward her endless course to shape.
Unreal as insects that appal
A drunkard’s peevish brain,
O’er the grey deep the dories crawl,
Four-legged, with rowers twain:
Midgets and minims of the earth,
Across old ocean’s vasty girth
Toiling – heroic, comical!
I wonder how that merchant’s crew
Have ever found the will!
I wonder what the fishers do
To keep them toiling still!
I wonder how the heart of man
Has patience to live out its span,
Or wait until its dreams come true.
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY
****
The title sounded unpromisingly sombre, and a little too close to the prevailing meteorological conditions, but I found these verses by William Vaughn Moody surprisingly buoyant and cheering. The technical poise and the wry sense of humour appealed to me. A comment by Michael Palma in the Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry (edited by Ian Hamilton, 1994) seemed to be borne out. Despite some sensible reservations, Palma notes Moody to be “an important figure in the struggle to modernise American poetry”.
The poems of such neglected American figures, and their UK counterparts, are often fascinatingly archaeological, layering and combining the new and not-so-new resources of poetic diction. Moody, born in Indiana in 1869, died in 1910. He was a little too early on the modernist scene, and his poetry doesn’t reliably “make it new”. In A Grey Day, admittedly, there’s no shortage of grammatical inversion (“Grey drizzling mists the moorlands drape”) and other dusty little turns of phrase. At the same time, some sharp and immediate observation gets recorded. “Rain whitens the dead sea” but the sails are “grey” rather than white, and the same colour as the “grey drizzling”. This is effective descriptive writing: it puts us exactly in the picture.
A “merchantman” is a ship, of course, and Moody personifies it (or “her”) in the traditional way. “I know not how that merchantman / Has found the heart; but ‘t is her plan / Seaward her endless course to shape”. That feminine pronoun after “merchantman” delivers a small shock to the contemporary reader, but perhaps the gender-jolt works in the poem’s favour, preparing us for the more dramatic surrealistic “turn” in the next stanza.
While Moody begins his observations of deep-sea wildlife with a comparison to the nightmare insect population of alcoholic delirium, again, we get the impression that he has observed the actual creatures he terms “dories” and seems to imagine as a kind of crustacean, a lobster, perhaps, rather than a boat.
The diction here comes to ungainly life. Yes, even the poeticisms, “rowers twain” and “vasty girth”, pull their weight in Moody’s marine comedy. It includes the human mammal, implicitly, as a player. We are not so different from the sea creatures, those “midgets and minims of the earth”, plying their incessant toil. We might look equally “heroic, comical!” to an alien eye.
The exclamatory last stanza rings clear and true. Moody was a significant dramatist, and, even while writing metrical lines, he’s able to capture a convincing speech-rhythm and idiom. He avoids moralising, too – simply “wondering” about the phenomenon of human tenacity. Perhaps we’re tempted to retort that it’s the need to earn a living which keeps the fishers “toiling still” – but that would be small-mindedly to exclude other aspects of human motivation, and deny the vitality and courage required to go forward into the grey sea on the grey day. And, yes, it’s impressive, that “the heart of man / Has patience to live out its span / … [and] wait until its dreams come true”. The conventional language suggests the ordinariness and pathos of the two essential human concerns – the day-to-day living and the future-dreaming, the hard graft and the long hope.
The metrical pattern of each stanza is interesting. The first four lines of the seven alternate between tetrameter and trimeter, while the last three are in tetrameter. That allowance of an extra beat may be one of the reasons why the poem somehow conveys a sense of optimistic forward movement, a hope that the day won’t be as grey an experience as predicted.