William Sharp.
We journeyed by sea to Naples. Our hopes of a chat with our friends the Janviers at Marseilles were frustrated by a violent gale we encountered. As my husband wrote to Mrs. Janvier while at sea:
R.M.S. Orizaba,
Oct. 31, 1903.
It seems strange to write to you on the Festival of Samhain—the Celtic Summer-end, our Scottish Hallowe’en—here on these stormy waters between Sardinia and Italy. It is so strong a gale, and the air is so inclement and damp that it is a little difficult to realise we are approaching the shores of Italy. But wild as the night is I want to send you a line on it, on this end of the old year, this night of powers and thoughts and spiritual dominion.
It was a disappointment not to get ashore at Marseilles—but the fierce gale (a wild mistral) made it impossible. Indeed the steamer couldn’t approach: we lay-to for 3 or 4 hours behind a great headland some 4 or 5 miles to S. W. of the city, and passengers and mails had to be driven along the shore and embarked from a small quarry pier.... We had a very stormy and disagreeable passage all the way from Plymouth and through the Bay. ... The first part of the voyage I was very unwell, partly from an annoying heart attack. You may be sure I am better again, or I could not have withstood the wild gale which met us far south in the Gulf of Lyons and became almost a hurricane near Marseilles. But I gloried in the superb magnificence of the lashed and tossed sport of the mistral, as we went before it like an arrow before a gigantic bow.
It is now near sunset and I am writing under the shelter of a windsail on the upper deck, blowing ‘great guns’ though I don’t think we are in for more than a passing gale. But for every reason I shall be glad to get ashore, not that I want to be in Naples, which I like least of any place in Italy, but to get on to Maniace ... where I so much love to be, and where I can work and dream so well....
But the gale increased and became one of the wildest we had ever known, as William reminded me later when he showed me an unrhymed poem he had composed—exactly as it stands—in the middle of the night, and the next day, in Naples, recalled it and wrote it down. It was his way of mental escape from a physical condition which induced great nervous strain or fatigue, to create imaginatively a contrary condition and environment, and so to identify himself with it, that he could become oblivious to surrounding actualities. This is the poem:
INVOCATION
Play me a lulling tune, O Flute-Player of Sleep,