The sea runs back against itself
With scarcely time for breaking wave
To cannonade a slatey shelf
And thunder under in a cave.
Winter Seascape, John Betjeman
Archive for the ‘Culture’ Category
Seascape 3 comments
Fog Leave a comment
Those moments, tasted once and never done,
Of long surf breaking in the mid-day sun.
A far-off blow-hole booming like a gun-
The seagulls plane and circle out of sight
Below this thirsty, thrift-encrusted height,
The veined sea-campion buds burst into white
And gorse turns tawny orange, seen beside
Pale drifts of primroses cascading wide
To where the slate falls sheer into the tide.
Cornish Cliffs, by John Betjeman
One of the pleasures of writing up this book (and then editing and re-editing what you’ve written, as I’ve spent the past two days doing) is reliving past adventures. Going through the photos and notes makes the actual paddling recede into the fog of memory loss that bit more slowly.
Poet Laureate Leave a comment
As a boy, John Betjeman holidayed with his family each year beside the River Camel estuary.
Here Petroc landed, here I stand today
The same Atlantic surges roll for me
North Coast Recollections, John Betjeman
Small Island Leave a comment
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England
Shakespeare, Richard II
Offshore Leave a comment
‘For all the celebrations it had been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness…’
Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea
Another wet windy weekend Leave a comment
If I wait, I am a castle
Built with blocks of pain.
If I set out
A kayak stitched with pain
Ted Hughes, Gaudete.
Sea-Fever 7 comments
I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky.
I left my shoes and socks there. I wonder if they’re dry?
(Not) John Masefield
Shorebound Leave a comment
The secrets of the hoarie deep, a dark
Illimitable Ocean without bound,
Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth,
And time and place are lost.
Milton, Paradise Lost.
Moderate or rough, occasionally very rough in west 1 comment
A man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drowned, he said, for he will be going out on a day he shouldn’t. But we do be afraid of the sea, and we do only be drownded now and again.
John Millington Synge
February 14th 2 comments
Did sea define the land or land the sea?
Each drew new meaning from the waves’ collision.
Sea broke on land to full identity.
Seamus Heaney
