The Uncertain Land and Other Poems. Patrick O’Brian

‘Loose-bellied, grey’

       Old Men

       ‘When your lance fails’

       Part II: Drafts

       The Sardana for the First Time

       ‘Yesterday an old husband’

       ‘Whereas in Jewry came a star’

       ‘Not that a hard-roed herring should presume’

       ‘The pattering of rain’

       ‘The cry of buzzards in the sky’

       ‘Vicious intromission’

       Forbear O Venus pray forbear

       A halt on the Trans-Siberian

       ‘When my Muse and Chian Veins vie’

       The sorrow & woe

       Boars

       Night walking

       ‘On the mountain I have quite a good sense of direction’

       The True-born Englishman

       ‘Sun sloping through the cypresses’

       Labuntur anni (The advancing years)

       ‘Peace; a great lawn that small, fat feet’

       The hard winter

       ‘An old thin tall man’

       What the hell do you know about poverty?

       ‘The north wind low over the house’

       ‘High on the cold mountain road’

       ‘I went out in a night of tearing wind’

       ‘A wheeling buzzard lifting to the sun’

       ‘Thoughts that range from anger and revenge’

       ‘Of France and of the knowledge of that land’

       Captivity

       ‘When a dry heart sets a bleeding’

       Loud-mouthed neighbours through the floor

       ‘For Jojo’s livre d’or 85’

       Footnotes

       Acknowledgements

       Index of first lines

       The Works of Patrick O’Brian

       About the Publisher

       Foreword

      I do not know when Patrick first began composing poetry. However, I strongly suspect that it was during his frequently lonely adolescence, when he was cooped up largely alone in his father’s successive homes. He was from an early age a voracious reader. He was also a passionate devotee of the natural world, and during the three years he lived as an adolescent boy at Lewes in Sussex he spent long happy hours wandering along the banks of the nearby river Ouse, and along the sands of the beach below the towering white cliffs at Seaford. Much of his poetry is concerned with limpid depictions of animals, especially birds, and delicate descriptions of the landscape with which he was familiar.

      The earliest specimens of his poetry to have survived are, in contrast, robustly humorous (even mildly erotic) – which will come as no surprise to readers of the Aubrey-Maturin epic. During the Blitz in 1940–41 he and my mother drove ambulances in Chelsea, which was heavily bombed by Luftwaffe aeroplanes offloading their remaining bombs before returning homeward above the moonlit Thames. Patrick entertained his fellow workers in the ambulance station at 18 Danvers Street by acting as unofficial bard of the unit. There he composed a lively anthem for the denizens of number 22 Station of the London Auxiliary Ambulance Service. He also concocted a poetic narrative recounting the nocturnal adventures of my mother’s faithful dachshund, Miss Patz, who sneaks out of her lodgings to join the regulars at the Black Lion pub around the corner from the ambulance station, and moves on to one of the many shady little drinking clubs which characterised the perilous Chelsea of those days. I suspect that Miss Patz’s exploits reflected in some degree those of her adventurous owner. My mother, in addition, assisted with the fluent German and French sections of the poem, being fluent in both languages.

      For four years after the War my parents lived in a tiny cottage in the mountains of Snowdonia, where their fare depended in large part on Patrick’s skill with rod and gun. They were also avid followers of the local foxhounds, a hunt conducted on foot amid wildly dramatic mountain scenery. There, as Patrick’s novel Three Bear Witness^fn1 attests, he paid minute attention to landscape and wildlife. I find it hard to believe that he did not also commemorate them in poetry at the same time, although all of his muse that survives is his cheerful ode to a generous American lady who sent them tins of marmalade in 1946.

      In 1949 he and my mother migrated to Collioure in the south of France. During the more rewarding decades which ensued, Patrick regularly jotted down poems in little notebooks and on odd sheets of paper. Among the earliest verse surviving from that period are allusions to the wild and rugged landscape they had left behind them, which was not dissimilar to that of the Pyrenees towering above the little town.

      Many of Patrick’s salient characteristics are revealed in this collection: his recurring fear of death, love of local scenery, and careful perception of the patient labours of the local inhabitants. Although he was broadly apolitical, in his poem Espagnols exilés he manifests poignant sympathy for Spanish Republicans who had fled across the frontier in 1939, a residue of whom lingered on in Collioure after my parents’ arrival.

      However, it should not be thought that his themes are all melancholy. He cherished a copy of Edward Lear’s poems, given to me by a fond great-aunt for my fourth birthday, which my mother abstracted shortly afterwards when she departed our family home to live with Patrick. ‘A dog bit his master’, composed not long after their arrival at Collioure, provides a fine specimen of Patrick’s love of the absurd.

      In the following year he composed his poem ‘In Upper Leeson Street’, which nostalgically evokes his memorable stay in Dublin in 1937, where he completed his precocious novel Hussein. Although even in private he talked little about his former life (save, I assume, to my mother), it is clear that in his mind he dwelt much on their early days of adventurous privation, as well as images of people and places lovingly stored in his memory. The earliest allusions are to be found in the reverie ‘If I could go back into my dream’, which if I am not mistaken draws upon childish fancies of wild beasts frequenting the streets, areas, and corners of the London with which he was familiar when living there as a small boy of five.

      Although Patrick devoted much care to poetic composition, much of it does not appear even to have been submitted for publication. Unlike his prose, which he generally looked upon with justified approval, he quite frequently expressed hesitant reservations about the value of his poetry. As he noted in his diary in October 1978, ‘More work on poems, but doubt keeps creeping in & as I wrote on one of them, simplicity can come v close to silliness’. But he was rigorously self-critical, and I for one find his poetry delightful.

      He was strongly drawn to the genre, and possessed a particular penchant for the writings of Chaucer, which he possessed in Tyrwhitt’s handsome two-volume edition (1798). Time and again, when relaxing with a drink after the day’s labours were done, he would return to the ebullient Father of English Poetry with zestful pleasure. When I stayed with my parents in the days of my youth, we would follow supper by taking it in turns to read aloud our