Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, poet and playwright, lived 1878-1962 in London and elsewhere in England. He founded the short-lived poetry magazine, "New Numbers". In 1917 he lectured in the United States, and in 1924 he wrote the play, "Kestrel Edge".

Here and there, Wilfrid Gibson's first name has been misspelled Wilfred. But I have read these two poems and many others in "Poems, by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson", NYC, September 1917, "Copyright 1912, 1914, 1915, 1916 and 1917 by The Macmillan Company". (That's what its title page says; its cover reads, "Collected Poems, by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson.") This book, acquired by the Natick library in 1918, is a direct and contemporary reference and its frontispiece is an unfinished portrait of him, with his personal signature beneath: the dot over the second "i" in "Wilfrid" is very clear. That's his own opinion, AFTER he wrote both poems -- it also lists dates for the collections in which each appeared: "The Dancing Seal" was in "Fires" (1910-11), "The Ice-Cart" in "Friends" (1915-16).

I first read these two poems in "Echoes of the Sea", an anthology of sea poetry by Elinor Parker; her book spells his name Wilfred, and has dozens of punctuation changes. The following versions are from the 1917 "Collected Poems, by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson". Their punctuation, while unorthodox, is authentic.

When we were building Skua Light--
The first men who had lived a night
Upon that deep-sea Isle--
As soon as chisel touched the stone,
The friendly seals would come ashore;
And sit and watch us all the while,
As if they'd not seen men before;
And so, poor beasts, had never known
Men had the heart to do them harm.
They'd little cause to feel alarm
With us, for we were glad to find
Some friendliness in that strange sea;
Only too pleased to let them be
And sit as long as they'd a mind
To watch us: for their eyes were kind
Like women's eyes, it seemed to me.
So, hour on hour, they sat: I think
They liked to hear the chisels' clink:
And when the boy sang loud and clear,
They scrambled closer in to hear;
And if he whistled sweet and shrill,
The queer beasts shuffled nearer still:
But every sleek and sheeny skin
Was mad to hear his violin.

When, work all over for the day,
He'd take his fiddle down and play
His merry tunes beside the sea,
Their eyes grew brighter and more bright,
And burned and twinkled merrily:
And, as I watched them one still night,
And saw their eager sparkling eyes,
I felt those lively seals would rise
Some shiny night ere he could know,
And dance about him, heel and toe,
Unto the fiddle's heady tune.

And at the rising of the moon,
Half-daft, I took my stand before
A young seal lying on the shore;
And called on her to dance with me.
And it seemed hardly strange when she
Stood up before me suddenly,
And shed her black and sheeny skin;
And smiled, all eager to begin . . .
And I was dancing, heel and toe,
With a young maiden white as snow,
Unto a crazy violin.

We danced beneath the dancing moon
All night, beside the dancing sea,
With tripping toes and skipping heels:
And all about us friendly seals
Like Christian folk were dancing reels
Unto the fiddle's endless tune
That kept on spinning merrily
As though it never meant to stop.
And never once the snow-white maid
A moment stayed
To take a breath,
Though I was fit to drop:
And while those wild eyes challenged me,
I knew as well as well could be
I must keep step with that young girl,
Though we should dance to death.

Then with a skirl
The fiddle broke:
The moon went out:
The sea stopped dead:
And, in a twinkling, all the rout
Of dancing folk had fled . . .
And in the chill bleak dawn I woke
Upon the naked rock, alone.

They've brought me far from Skua Isle . . .
I laugh to think they do not know
That as, all day, I chip the stone,
Among my fellows here inland,
I smell the sea-wrack on the shore . . .
And see her snowy-tossing hand,
And meet again her merry smile . . .
And dream I'm dancing all the while,
I'm dancing ever, heel and toe,
With a seal-maiden, white as snow,
On that moonshiny Island-strand,
For ever and for evermore.

Perched on my city office stool,
I watched with envy, while a cool
And lucky carter handled ice. . . .
And I was wandering in a trice,
Far from the grey and grimy heat
Of that intolerable street,
O'er sapphire berg and emerald floe,
Beneath the still, cold ruby glow
Of everlasting Polar night,
Bewildered by the queer half-light,
Until I stumbled unawares,
Upon a creek where big white bears
Plunged headlong down with flourished heels
And floundered after shining seals
Through shivering seas of blinding blue.
And as I watched them, ere I knew,
I'd stripped, and I was swimming, too,
Among the seal-pack, young and hale,
And thrusting on with threshing tail,
With twist and twirl and sudden leap
Through crackling ice and salty deep --
Diving and doubling with my kind,
Until, at last, we left behind
Those big, white, blundering bulks of death,
And lay, at last, with panting breath
Upon a far untravelled floe,
Beneath a gentle drift of snow --
Snow drifting gently, fine and white,
Out of the endless Polar night,
Falling and falling evermore
Upon that far untravelled shore,
Till I was buried fathoms deep
Beneath that cold white drifting sleep --
Sleep drifting deep,
Deep drifting sleep. . . .

The carter cracked a sudden whip:
I clutched my stool with startled grip,
Awakening to the grimy heat
Of that intolerable street.

Away by the lands of the Japanee,
     When the paper lanterns glow
And the crews of all the shipping drink
     In the house of Blood Street Joe,
At twilight, when the landward breeze
     Brings up the harbour noise,
And ebb of Yokohama Bay
     Swigs chattering through the buoys,
In Cisco's Dewdrop Dining Rooms
     They tell the tale anew
Of a hidden sea and a hidden fight,
When the Baltic ran from the Northern Light
     And the Stralsund fought the two!

Now this is the law of the Muscovite, that he proves with shot and steel,
When ye come by his isles in the Smoky Sea ye must not take the seal,
Where the gray sea goes nakedly between the weed-hung shelves,
And the little blue fox he is bred for his skin
     and the seal they breed for themselves;
For when the matkas seek the shore to drop their pups aland,
The great man-seal haul out of the sea, aroaring, band by band;
And when the first September gales have slaked their rutting-wrath,
The great man-seal haul back to the sea and no man knows their path.

Then dark they lie and stark they lie--rookery, dune, and floe,
And the Northern Lights come down o' nights
     to dance with the houseless snow.
And God who clears the grounding berg and steers the grinding floe,
He hears the cry of the little kit-fox and the lemming on the snow.
But since our women must walk gay and money buys their gear,
The sealing-boats they filch that way at hazard year by year.
English they be and Japanee that hang on the Brown Bear's flank,
And some be Scot, but the worst, God wot,
     and the boldest thieves, be Yank!

It was the sealer Northern Light, to the Smoky Seas she bore.
With a stovepipe stuck from a starboard port
     and the Russian flag at her fore.
(Baltic, Stralsund, and Northern Light--oh! they were birds of a feather--
Slipping away to the Smoky Seas, three seal-thieves together!)
And at last she came to a sandy cove and the Baltic lay therein,
But her men were up with the herding seal to drive and club and skin.

There were fifteen hundred skins abeach, cool pelt and proper fur,
When the Northern Light drove into the bight
     and the sea-mist drove with her.
The Baltic called her men and weighed--she could not choose but run--
For a stovepipe seen through the closing mist, it shows like a four-inch gun
(And loss it is that is sad as death to lose both trip and ship
And lie for a rotting contraband on Vladivostock slip).
She turned and dived in the sea-smother as a rabbit dives in the whins,
And the Northern Light sent up her boats to steal the stolen skins.

They had not brought a load to side or slid their hatches clear,
When they were aware of a sloop-of-war, ghost-white and very near.
Her flag she showed, and her guns she showed--
     three of them, black, abeam,
And a funnel white with the crusted salt, but never a show of steam.
There was no time to man the brakes, they knocked the shackle free,
And the Northern Light stood out again, goose-winged to open sea.

(For life it is that is worse than death, by force of Russian law
To work in the mines of mercury that loose the teeth in your jaw!)
They had not run a mile from shore--they heard no shots behind--
When the skipper smote his hand on his thigh
     and threw her up in the wind:
"Bluffed--raised out on a bluff," said he, "for if my name's Tom Hall,
"You must set a thief to catch a thief--and a thief has caught us all!
"By every butt in Oregon and every spar in Maine,
"The hand that spilled the wind from her sail
     was the hand of Reuben Paine!
"He has rigged and trigged her with paint and spar,
     and, faith, he has faked her well--
"But I'd know the Stralsund's deckhouse yet
     from here to the booms o' Hell.
"Oh, once we ha' met at Baltimore, and twice on Boston pier,
"But the sickest day for you, Reuben Paine,
     was the day that you came here--
"The day that you came here, my lad, to scare us from our seal
"With your funnel made o' your painted cloth,
     and your guns o' rotten deal!
"Ring and blow for the Baltic now, and head her back to the bay,
"For we'll come into the game again with a double deck to play!"

They rang and blew the sealer's call--the poaching cry o' the sea--
And they raised the Baltic out of the mist, and an angry ship was she:
And blind they groped through the whirling white,
     and blind to the bay again,
Till they heard the creak of the Stralsund's boom
     and the clank of her mooring-chain.
They laid them down by bitt and boat, their pistols in their belts,
And: "Will you fight for it, Reuben Paine, or will you share the pelts?"

A dog-toothed laugh laughed Reuben Paine, and bared his flenching knife.
"Yea, skin for skin, and all that he hath a man will give for his life;
But I've six thousand skins below, and Yeddo Port to see,
And there's never a law of God or man runs north of Fifty-Three.
So go in peace to the naked seas with empty holds to fill,
And I'll be good to your seal this catch, as many as I shall kill."

Answered the snap of a closing lock and the jar of a gun-butt slid,
But the tender fog shut fold on fold to hide the wrong they did.
The weeping fog rolled fold on fold the wrath of man to cloak,
And the flame-spurts pale ran down the rail as the sealing-rifles spoke.
The bullets bit on bend and butt, the splinter slivered free,
(Little they trust to sparrow-dust that stop the seal in his sea!)
The thick smoke hung and would not shift, leaden it lay and blue,
But three were down on the Baltic's deck and two of the Stralsund's crew.

An arm's length out and overside the banked fog held them bound;
But, as they heard a groan or word, they fired at the sound.
For one cried out on the name of God, and one to have him cease;
And the questing volley found them both and bade them hold their peace.
And one called out on a heathen joss and one on the Virgin's Name;
And the schooling bullet leaped across
     and showed them whence they came.

And in the waiting silences the rudder whined beneath,
And each man drew his watchful breath slow taken 'tween the teeth--
Trigger and ear and eye acock, knit brow and hard-drawn lips--
Bracing his feet by chock and cleat for the rolling of the ships;
Till they heard the cough of a wounded man
     that fought in the fog for breath,
Till they heard the torment of Reuben Paine that wailed upon his death:

"The tides they'll go through Fundy Race but I'll go never more
"And see the hogs from ebb-tide mark turn scampering back to shore.
"No more I'll see the trawlers drift below the Bass Rock ground,
"Or watch the Fall steamer lights tear blazing up the Sound.
"Sorrow is me, in a lonely sea and a sinful fight I fall,
"But if there's law o' God or man you'll swing for it yet, Tom Hall!"

Tom Hall stood up by the quarter-rail.
     "Your words in your teeth," said he.
"There's never a law of God or man runs north of Fifty Three.
"So go in grace with Him to face, and an ill-spent life behind,
"And I'll take care o' your widows, Rube, as many as I shall find."

A Stralsund man shot blind and large, and a warlock Finn was he,
And he hit Tom Hall with a bursting ball a hand's-breadth over the knee.
Tom Hall caught hold by the topping-lift, and sat him down with an oath,
"You'll wait a little, Rube," he said, "the Devil has called for both.
"The Devil is driving both this tide, and the killing-grounds are close,
"And we'll go up to the Wrath of God as the holluschickie goes.
"O men, put back your guns again and lay your rifles by,
"We've fought our fight, and the best are down. Let up and let us die!
"Quit firing, by the bow there--quit! Call off the Baltic's crew!
"You're sure of Hell as me or Rube--but wait till we get through."

There went no word between the ships, but thick and quick and loud
The life-blood drummed on the dripping decks,
     with the fog-dew from the shroud,
The sea-pull drew them side by side, gunnel to gunnel laid,
And they felt the sheerstrakes pound and clear, but never a word was said.

Then Reuben Paine cried out again before his spirit passed:
"Have I followed the sea for thirty years to die in the dark at last?
"Curse on her work that has nipped me here with a shifty trick unkind--
"I have gotten my death where I got my bread, but I dare not face it blind.
"Curse on the fog! Is there never a wind of all the winds I knew
"To clear the smother from off my chest, and let me look at the blue?"

The good fog heard--like a splitten sail, to left and right she tore,
And they saw the sun-dogs in the haze and the seal upon the shore.
Silver and gray ran spit and bay to meet the steel-backed tide,
And pinched and white in the clearing light the crews stared overside.
O rainbow-gay the red pools lay that swilled and spilled and spread,
And gold, raw gold, the spent shell rolled between the careless dead--
The dead that rocked so drunkenwise to weather and to lee,
And they saw the work their hands had done as God had bade them see!

And a little breeze blew over the rail that made the headsails lift,
But no man stood by wheel or sheet, and they let the schooners drift.
And the rattle rose in Reuben's throat and he cast his soul with a cry,
And "Gone already?" Tom Hall he said. "Then it's time for me to die."
His eyes were heavy with great sleep and yearning for the land,
And he spoke as a man that talks in dreams, his wound beneath his hand.
"Oh, there comes no good in the westering wind
     that backs against the sun;
"Wash down the decks--they're all too red--and share the skins and run,
"Baltic, Stralsund, and Northern Light,--clean share and share for all,
"You'll find the fleets off Tolstoi Mees, but you will not find Tom Hall.
"Evil he did in shoal-water and blacker sin on the deep,
"But now he's sick of watch and trick, and now he'll turn and sleep.
"He'll have no more of the crawling sea that made him suffer so,
"But he'll lie down on the killing-grounds where the holluschickie go.
"And west you'll turn and south again, beyond the sea-fog's rim,
"And tell the Yoshiwara girls to burn a stick for him.
"And you'll not weight him by the heels and dump him overside,
"But carry him up to the sand-hollows to die as Bering died,
"And make a place for Reuben Paine that knows the fight was fair,
"And leave the two that did the wrong to talk it over there!"

Half-steam ahead by guess and lead, for the sun is mostly veiled--
Through fog to fog, by luck and log, sail ye as Bering sailed;
And, if the light shall lift aright to give your land-fall plain,
North and by west, from Zapne Crest, ye raise the Crosses Twain.
Fair marks are they to the inner bay, the reckless poacher knows,
What time the scarred see-catchie lead their sleek seraglios.
Ever they hear the floe-pack clear, and the blast of the old bull-whale,
And the deep seal-roar that beats off shore above the loudest gale.
Ever they wait the winter's hate as the thundering boorga calls,
Where northward look they to St. George, and westward to St. Paul's.
Ever they greet the hunted fleet--lone keels off headlands drear--
When the sealing-schooners flit that way at hazard year by year.

Ever in Yokohama Port men tell the tale anew
     Of a hidden sea and a hidden fight,
     When the Baltic ran from the Northern Light
And the Stralsund fought the two!

North of the Aleutian Islands, where the Japan Current spills warm water into the Bering Sea, fog prevails and storms are common. It cost Russian colonists twenty years of dangerous searching with a hundred ships in fog-bound seas before, in June 1786, they finally located the Pribilof Islands, elusive breeding grounds for the world's largest population of fur-bearing seals. By 1867, when Russia sold the Pribilof Islands and the rest of Alaska to the United States of America, these small isles were already heavily plundered by foreign sealing-schooners. "Seward's Folly" was hardly that, as the annual income from Pribilof Islands sealskins quickly returned more than the entire purchase price of Alaska!

Rudyard Kipling knew sailing ships, and if he didn't visit the Pribilof Islands in person, he certainly researched them well, as evidenced in this poem, and in his Jungle Book tale, "The White Seal" (with its explanations of Pribilof Islands terminology) and its sad seal-poem, "Lukannon".

For an accurate, contemporary description of these strange isles, their seals and sealers, see the following recommended reading:
"The Seal-Islands of Alaska" (The History and Present Condition of the Fishery Industries), by Henry Wood Elliott (of the "Smithsonian Institution"), Government Printing Office, Washington D.C., 1881.
"Investigation of the Fur-seal and other Fisheries of Alaska" by the U.S. House of Representatives, G.P.O., Washington D.C., 1889.

Also recommended:
"Libby -- The Sketches, Letters and Journal of Libby Beaman, Recorded in the Pribilof Islands, 1879-1880". by Libby Beaman.
"Sea Bears, The Story of the Fur Seal", by Fredericka Martin, Chilton Co., Philadelphia and Ambassador Books, Ltd., Toronto, 1960.
"Lord of Alaska", by Hector Chevigny, 1942.
"Russian America; The Great Alaskan Venture, 1741-1867", by Hector Chevigny, 1965.
"The Thousand-Mile War--World War II in Alaska and the Aleutians", by Brian Garfield, Doubleday & Co., N.Y.C., 1969.

See today's Pribilof Islands weather.

A poetry note: "And God who clears the grounding berg and steers the grinding floe" retains Kipling's punctuation from the 1896 original edition. Other online versions may show "God Who", or "God, who", instead.

Roses fell in great folds
over the fences
filling my eyes with the season.
Rain fell in whispered voices
surrounding us;
I wondered if we were dying.
Rose petals fell like soldiers
one by one, shocking the window sill with their blood.
I touched your hand;
you stirred your coffee.
Breakers fell like huge tears,
one by one, staining the beach
all the way to Cahoon Hollow.
I slipped my hand in yours, you slipped away.
Inside, I haunted the hallways,
pale as a Nantucket ghost. Outside you hunted,
a dusky Diana unfolding.
The portrait over the mantelpiece
stared at half empty coffee cups
grown cold.

Note: Mary originally dashed this off as a take-off on what New Yorker Magazine likes. By the time she finished, her spoof was good enough to win!

Untitled

The gospels are served up
as sanctifying
-- so also this:

On four words
created by the devil himself
hangs all suffering:
ugly, beautiful, good, bad.
 

Gasoline

I am a great God
and my price is $1.40 per gallon
and men murder one another for my sake.

Whee!
when fire has kissed me
and iron trembles: life!
Then
I know
why I have dreamt so long
under the earth.

The rails that run by Honey Creek are eaten up with rust,
And no one walks the greasy bed hid in the roses' dust;
But yet at night a slender ghost may stalk the quiet sky--
And bats will shiver as they see Kate Shelley going by.

Kate Shelley from a quiet house, Kate Shelley in the storm...
She took a lantern in her hand to keep her spirit warm;
The clouds came up and thundered haste and Honey Creek was foam;
The waters laughed with blackened breath below Kate Shelley's home.

"O daughter, go you to the door, I hear a whistle call,
Crying within the valley dark that shadows over all.
Your father was a section man; you are the seed he sowed..
So listen, listen in the storm and guard the iron road."

Her father was a section man; she knew the mighty wheels
That ground along the bottom land amid the tempest's heels.
She listened in the howling dark--and heard a sundered scream,
When ninety tons of steel went down into the boiling stream.

"My father was a section man--he reared me for the road.."
She climbed the gashed and sullen grade while oaken saplings bowed;
She prayed to gods of spade and pick, she prayed to tie and rail...
The river bridge was like a priest in rainy vestments pale.

The midnight coaches from the west plunged in the dripping rain;
West of Moingona ties were sound--east was a broken train.
(East in the bile of Honey Creek in one drowned, twisting curl,
Lay ninety tons of twisted steel.) Between them was a girl.

Under the river bridge was death--black fathoms frothing down.
Beyond Moingona sang the train on to a lonely town;
The engineer swayed in his cab, he could not see ahead;
"Two hours more...I leave the run and get me home to bed."

Two hours more...The whistle whined shrill in the driven rain,
Two hours more...(A broken span, a ghost where there was a train).
Across the river bridge a girl came creeping on the ties;
The wind wiped out her lantern flame, but still she had her eyes.

And still she had her Irish soul, and still she had her heart!
The spikes cut furrows in her skin and tore her flesh apart,
Two yards beneath, the river's tongue clove at the shaking span...
A wraith beside her urged her on: "I was a section man..."

Down in a pocket of the hills Moingona hid its head--
And men with muscles pillowed down, slumbering as the dead,
One light shone thinly through the night under the battled din,
A bleeding hand clutched the door--a torn shape staggered in.

No song of thanks, no valiant yell: "God! and the train is saved!"
None but wheels which tightened down when crimson lanterns waved;
Nothing but brandy held to lips by someone of the crew...
"I'll ride the cab," she said, "and show just where the boys went through."

She rode the cab and guided them. (The anxious whistle bawled.)
She rode in torn and bloody rags the ties where she had crawled.
And if the station mice were there they saw the sundered heap,
And watched the rescue party toil before Kate went to sleep.

And nine and forty years are gone; the trains no longer come
Along the crest of Honey Creek before Kate Shelley's home.
Oh, there were songs for other years when all the road was hers--
And there were men to bless her name, and gold to fill her purse.

But if you go to Honey Creek in some dark summer storm,
Be sure you take a lantern flame to keep your spirit warm,
For there will be a phantom train, and foggy whistle cries--
And in the lightning flare you'll see Kate Shelley on the ties.
 

This story is true; Kate Shelley was "The Iowa Heroine" who crawled across the Des Moines River Bridge in 1881 to save a Chicago and North Western passenger train. But she was nearly forgotten when a young reporter, not yet known as one of America's great authors, wrote this tribute in 1930. This poem does not appear in MacKinlay Kantor's poetry collection, "Turkey In The Straw", and it isn't even listed by the U.S. Library of Congress. I am indebted to Charles Irwin of the Boone County Historical Society in Boone, Iowa for providing an old, typed copy, and am pleased to share it with you.

An earlier poem, "Kate Shelley", by Eugene J. Hall:
http://www3.nf.sympatico.ca/mhennebury/kshelly.html

April 18th - Protest march:
First, students stood, and asked to speak
With rulers now grown old and weak.
They sought a fair exchange of views,
Honest rulers, honest news.
Their rulers shunned them, week by week.

April 22nd - Hunger strike:
The students stood in Tiananmen Square.
"Democracy!", they said. "Be fair!"
Soon, a million with them stood
And all were hopeful, all were good.
But the rulers were not there.

May 20th - Martial law declared:
At last, the rulers gave a sign.
They would maintain their Party line,
Ignore the people, suppress the news,
Fight to retain their hard-won views.
To act all-knowing, yet still benign.

May 2Oth - Army dispatched:
The people bravely held their Square.
When tanks and soldiers tried to marshal there,
Ten thousand unarmed patriots before them stood
And stopped them, chanting "Brotherhood!"
The rulers must have torn their hair.

June 4th-27th - Army attacks defenseless citizens:
Forty-four days these patriots held their ground,
But then, less friendly soldiers came around
And massacred five hundred, or three thousand. Some say more;
Perhaps we'll never know the awful score.
The rulers then were nowhere to be found.

Epilogue:
The rulers, heroes once themselves, thus fiercely held their sway.
In Tiananmen Square, new heroes bled their lives away.
Beijing, and soon all China, saw the truth:
Old heroes now oppressed the country's youth.
Old heroes once, they lost their nation's love today.

First published in The Middlesex News (Framingham, Massachusetts, USA), June 14th, 1989 (page 13A). Copyright 1989 by A.R.Miller.

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