"Stowaways" by Lawrence Sail, from Waking Dreams: New and Selected Poems is one of a number of poems concerned in very different ways with seascapes, ships and voyages. "The cunning theatre of the sea," as Sail describes it another poem. "Notes for the Ship's Log," has always been a major fascination. "Protean, it is never the same as it was," he once wrote of the sea, attempting to pin down this fascination: "Look at it, then away and back, and already it has escaped the words you might have formed for it. Much of experience seems to have something of the same slipperiness, while also encouraging the urge to commute between it and meaning."
Once upon a time, the word "stowaway" carried its own little sea-feverish thrill. Children and dissatisfied adults dreamed of running away to sea. Readers still respond to the exhilarations of John Masefield's "Salt Water Ballads" while enjoying the rueful fun a "less deceived" Philip Larkin has with similar notions in "Poetry of Departures". But in this week's poem, stowing away is a desperate act, neither romantic nor risible. Lawrence Sail's own father was obliged to leave Nazi Germany in the 1930s, and the poem that shapes itself around the title is fully alert to the word's sombre 20th and 21st-century reverberations.
Each stanza consists of one complete sentence, broken into six short, uneven lines whose rhythms lift and fall like the movement of small, brisk waves. There are moments of precarious equilibrium, too, emphasised by the end-stopping of each stanza. We seem to hold our breath before another wave breaks.
Quite literally in the dark, the stowaways are introduced as "Blind passengers" who, "bracing themselves," must "test/ the strength of their old visions". Readers are not told about their origins, nor their hoped-for destination. Instead, we're given space for allegorical interpretation. For example, blindness and vision are concepts associated with the ancient bards and their tradition of composing in darkness. The stowaways might symbolise any artist on that uncharted creative journey whose goal is hidden. Perhaps they are political radicals, tossed on the unruly currents of a revolution they helped instigate. Equally, they may symbolise the poorest, most powerless of people, whose status, even on terra firma, is that of the social stowaway. Whoever they may be, they are unwelcome guests, and the poem tells us in its starkly uncluttered diction that "Some"… "are simply tipped overboard/ as if they were so much trash."
Stanzas three and four find the stowaways in an even more inhospitable element. People who hide in the unpressurised wheel-bays of aircraft often freeze to death. In a particularly heart-rending incident in 1999, two young African boys, Yaguine Koïta and Fodé Tounkara, died en route from Conakry, Guinea to Brussels. The plane made three return trips before their bodies were discovered. Other aircraft stowaways, like those described in the poem, may fall thousands of feet from the plane.
"Stowaways" provides enough specific detail for the reader to sense the travellers' experience, but consistently opens further possibilities. When the fourth stanza refers to memories of "the iron taste of blood" and contrasts them with the ideal of the "far horizon bright/ and burnished as New Jerusalem," we might think of asylum-seekers who have been beaten or tortured, and whose last hope is embodied in a glowingly unrealistic vision of a new country. At the same time, specifically Christian imagery ("iron" suggests the nails of the Crucifixion) could evoke a more spiritual pilgrimage.
The last stanza heightens the mystery. It seems to pursue the psychological condition of exile, in which the strangers, even if they've survived, may well look, and feel, like "insistent phantoms". It isn't clear what, exactly, has been accomplished, or how happily. Perhaps "the point where memory rounds on experience" indicates disillusion, yet it could also be the point of maturation. To "round on" someone is to attack them. But the verb, "to round" has other associations; there's the nautical term, "rounding the cape" and the finishing process of "rounding off" something to a satisfying conclusion. The land that stands out in "dark relief" (a beautiful pun) is perhaps that which marks the completion of our earthly voyage.
So, do they represent Everyman, these helpless passengers in time, stowaways of planet earth? I like that idea, but I like even better the idea of personification. The stowaways, then, would represent the poems or paintings we often fail to complete, or the ambitions which, once fulfilled, defy all our expectations. In the end, "Stowaways" may not be so much about the stowaways themselves, as our responsibility for them – whoever, whatever, they may be.
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Stowaways
Blind passengers, reduced
to pure anxiety, their spirits
rise and fall with each lift
and plunge of the butting hull:
bracing themselves, they test
the strength of their old visions.
Some, discovered after food
has gone missing from the galley,
or given away by a whiff
of tobacco seeping through a bulkhead,
are simply tipped overboard
as if they were so much trash.
Others, airborne, are undone
by cold – cold which unpicks,
finger by numbed finger,
their hold on a strut, slides them,
helpless, out from the wheelbay
into a shroud of thin air.
Falling through cloud or water,
perhaps their last recall
is the iron taste of blood,
the danger of not leaving,
or the far horizon bright
and burnished as New Jerusalem.
What is certain becomes so
only late on, when the stowaways
re-emerge, insistent phantoms,
at the point where memory rounds
on experience, and well within sight
of the dark relief of land.
Lawrence Sail