Then we began to go through the MS. line by line; Charlie parrying every objection and correction with:
“Yes, that may be better, but you don’t catch what I’m driving at.”
Charlie was, in one way at least, very like one kind of poet.
There was a pencil scrawl at the back of the paper and “What’s that?” I said.
“Oh that’s not poetry ‘t all. It’s some rot I wrote last night before I went to bed and it was too much bother to hunt for rhymes; so I made it a sort of a blank verse instead.”
Here is Charlie’s “blank verse”:
“We pulled for you when the wind was against us and the sails
were low.
Will you never let us go?
We ate bread and onions when you took towns or ran aboard
quickly when you were beaten back by the foe.
The captains walked up and down the deck in fair weather singing
songs, but we were below.
We fainted with our chins on the oars and you did not see that we
were idle for we still swung to and fro.
Will you never let us go?
The salt made the oar handles like sharkskin; our knees were cut to
the bone with salt cracks; our hair was stuck to our foreheads; and
our lips were cut to our gums and you whipped us because we
could not row.
Will you never let us go?
But in a little time we shall run out of the portholes as the water
runs along the oarblade, and though you tell the others to row after
us you will never catch us till you catch the oar-thresh and tie up
the winds in the belly of the sail. Aho!
Will you never let us go?”
“H’m. What’s oar-thresh, Charlie?”
“The water washed up by the oars. That’s the sort of song they might sing in the galley, y’know. Aren’t you ever going to finish that story and give me some of the profits?”
“It depends on yourself. If you had only told me more about your hero in the first instance it might have been finished by now. You’re so hazy in your notions.”