Who Speaks

(Sunrise by J. M. W. Turner, 1775-1851, English Romantic “painter of light,” watercolorist, and printmaker)

This month, we continue with poetry that can lead us to moments of quiet contemplation.

Today’s verse is a song by Tree-Leaf Woman, one of the poets whose works are preserved in a collection of poems by Tibetan Buddhist women from the eighth to the eleventh centuries. It was found in Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women, edited by Jane Hirshfield.

Who speaks the sound of an echo?
Who paints the image in a mirror?
Where are the spectacles in a dream?
Nowhere at all — that’s the nature of the mind!

Poems on the Slave Trade

(Robert Southey, poet laureate, 1813-1843)

Appointed poet laureate by George III, Robert Southey (1774-1843) was one of the Lake Poets, Romantics like Wordsworth and Coleridge who lived in the Lake District of England.

Like many artists and writers of the time, Southey did his best to encourage the support of the public for the campaign in the chambers of Parliament against the evil of slavery.

In 1797, he wrote a series of six sonnets on the slave trade. The verses begin with the story of the abduction of an African man and his imprisonment on a slave ship destined for forced labor in the New World. They end with the man’s gruesome hanging death for his part in a bloody mutiny against the ship’s “tyrant lord.”

POEMS ON THE SLAVE TRADE

Sonnet VI

High in the air expos’d the Slave is hung
To all the birds of Heaven, their living food!
He groans not, tho’ awaked by that fierce Sun
New torturers live to drink their parent blood!
He groans not, tho’ the gorging Vulture tear
The quivering fiber! hither gaze O ye
Who tore this Man from Peace and Liberty!
Gaze hither ye who weigh with scrupulous care
The right and prudent; for beyond the grave
There is another world! and call to mind,
Ere your decrees proclaim to all mankind
Murder is legalized, that there the Slave
Before the Eternal, “thunder-tongued shall plead
Against the deep damnation of your deed.”

The following year, Southey published a poem that showed another part of this evil enterprise. It tells the heart-rending tale of the cruelty that slavery imposed on the men who worked in this “peculiar institution,” as some have called slavery.

from THE SAILOR, WHO HAD SERVED IN THE SLAVE TRADE

O I have done a cursed deed,
The wretched man replies,
And night and day and everywhere
’Tis still before my eyes.

I sail’d on board a Guinea-man
And to the slave-coast went;
Would that the sea had swallowed me
When I was innocent!

And we took in our cargo there,
Three hundred negroe slaves,
And we sail’d homeward merrily
Over the ocean waves.

But some were sulky of the slaves
And would not touch their meat,
So therefore we were forced by threats
And blows to make them eat.

One woman sulkier than the rest
Would still refuse her food, —
O Jesus God! I hear her cries —
I see her in her blood!

The Captain made me tie her up
And flog while he stood by,
And then he curs’d me if I staid
My hand to hear her cry.

She groan’d, she shriek’d — I could not spare
For the Captain he stood by —
Dear God! that I might rest one night
From that poor woman’s cry!

She twisted from the blows — her blood
Her mangled flesh I see —
And still the Captain would not spare —
Oh he was worse than me!

She could not be more glad than I
When she was taken down,
A blessed minute — ’twas the last
That I have ever known!

I did not close my eyes all night,
Thinking what I had done;
I heard her groans and they grew faint
About the rising sun.

She groan’d and groan’d, but her groans grew
Fainter at morning tide,
Fainter and fainter still they came
Till at the noon she died.

They flung her overboard; — poor wretch
She rested from her pain, —
But when — O Christ! O blessed God!
Shall I have rest again!

I saw the sea close over her,
Yet she was still in sight;
I see her twisting everywhere;
I see her day and night.

Go where I will, do what I can
The wicked one I see —
Dear Christ have mercy on my soul,
O God deliver me!

The peaceful campaign against slavery finally succeeded with the vote in Parliament to abolish the British slave trade in 1807 and the practice of slavery in countries under British rule in 1833.

(For another example of how British artists and writers fought against slavery, click on the name of “Turner” in the labels below.)

Before you Read the Plaque about Turner's “Slave Ship”

(The Slave Ship or Slavers Throwing Overboard the
Dead and Dying — Typhoon Coming On, by J. M. W. Turner,
1775-1851, English painter, watercolorist, and printmaker)

Captains of slave ships carrying people in chains from Africa across the Middle Passage into slavery in the New World would throw the sick and dying overboard. The captain and the owners could then collect insurance for the lost “cargo”; there was no compensation for the lives of human beings lost to illness.

In 1783, the English slave ship Zong got lost, and sixty slaves and seven crew members died from illness. Thinking that the remaining slaves would become too weak to fetch good money in the slave auctions in Jamaica, the captain ordered 132 African men, women, and children to be shackled and thrown into the sea. One man survived to tell the tale. The case came to the courts in England. The insurance company won and did not pay the claim. No one faced any prosecution for this crime.

Turner painted this image, one of his most famous paintings, in 1840. The British Parliament had abolished the slave trade across its Empire thirty-three years earlier. Slavery was still flourishing, however, in countries ruled by Europe and in the United States. Turner offered this painting as part of the campaign against slavery.

Turner was inspired to create this deeply disturbing image by his abhorrence of slavery. He knew of the notorious case of the Zong, and he had read this verse by James Thomson:

from SUMMER, a part of THE SEASONS

Increasing still the terrors of these storms,
His jaws horrific arm’d with threefold fate,
Here dwells the direful Shark. Lured by the scent
Of steaming crowds, of rank disease, and death,
Behold, he, rushing, cuts the briny flood,
Swift as the Gale can bear the ship along;
And, from the partners of that cruel trade,
Which spoils unhappy Guinea of her sons,
Demands his share of prey — demands themselves.
The stormy Fates descend: one death involves
Tyrants and slaves; when straight, their mangled limbs
Crashing at once, he dyes the purple seas
With gore, and riots in the vengeful meal.

~ James Thomson (1700-1748), Scottish poet and playwright

While the captain of the Zong was not punished, in Turner’s depiction, the captain and crew of the slave ship all face divine fury. Notice at the bottom of the painting the mangled and shackled limbs of the murdered slaves, and above them, the slave ship, a ghost ship, empty, its captain and crew thrown into the maelstrom.

When the painting was first shown in the British Royal Academy in 1840, Turner attached this verse he himself had written in 1812:

from THE FALLACIES OF HOPE

Aloft all hands, strike the top-masts and belay;
Yon angry setting sun and fierce-edged clouds
Declare the Typhoon's coming.
Before it sweeps your decks, throw overboard
The dead and dying — ne’er heed their chains.
Hope, Hope, fallacious Hope!
Where is thy market now?

The last two lines of that poem were later carved on a plaque below the painting. (In the poem below, inspired by the painting, the poet repeats the plaque’s misspelling of “fallacious” as “fanacious.”)

BEFORE YOU READ THE PLAQUE ABOUT TURNER’S “SLAVE SHIP”

See the bare canvas. A pure white
bone that splits the sky’s
weak, warm skin of colors.

What will be left on the ocean floor,
What will be left under the swells,
What will be left is unspeakable
and vivid and not the vicious beauty
of cracking masts against the atmosphere
writing lines of blood. Not the blended light,
or the curious gulls. Not the market’s
fanacious hope.

Not the gods’ desperation to include us in this disaster,
without our will. But the bare, bright,
smoothed bones of many, many hands,

so cold, down where the master
could not imagine,
could not light
the darkest depths.

~ David Wright, American poet

Shore of Silence

(Sunrise, Norham Castle, J. M. W. Turner, 1775-1851,
English Romantic “painter of light”)

“A loving heart is the truest wisdom,” wrote the English author Charles Dickens (1812-1870).

from SHORE OF SILENCE

Love explained all for me,
all was resolved by love,
to this love I adore
wherever it may be.

I am open space for a placid tide
where no wave roars, clutching at rainbow branches.
Now a soothing wave uncovers light in the deep
and breathes light onto unsilvered leaves.

In such silence I hide,
a leaf released from the wind,
no longer anxious for the days that fall.
They must all fall, I know.

~ Karol Wojtyla (1920-2005), Polish priest, philosopher, playwright, and poet, later to become Pope John Paul II; translation by Jerzy Peterkiewicz