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Alun Lewis - On Embarkation Lyrics

I
Consider this silent disciplined assembly
Close squadded in the dockyard's hooded lamps,
Each blur a man with some obscure trouble
Or hard regret as bulky as the cargo
The cranking derricks drop into the hold.
Think of them as the derrick sways and poises
Vacantly as their minds do at this passage,
Good-natured agents of a groping purpose
That sends them now to strange precipitous places
Where all are human and Oh easily hurt
And - the temptation being to forget
Such villages as linger in the mind,
Lidice on the road from Bethlehem -
Ask whether kindness will persist in hearts
Plagued by the snags and rapids of a curse,
And whether the fortunate few will still attain
The sudden flexible grasp of a dangerous problem
And feel their failures broaden into manhood,
Or take the Bren's straightforward road
And grow voluptuous at the sight of blood?
Each of us is invisible to himelf,
Our eyes grow neutral in the long Unseen,
We take or do not take a hand of cards,
We shake down nightly in the strange Unknown.
Yet each one has a hankering in the blood,
A dark relation that disturbs his joke
And will not be abandoned with a shrug:
Each has a shrunken inkling of the Good.
And one man, wrapped in blankets, solemnly
Remembers as he bites his trembling nails
The white delightful limbs, the nest of peace.
And one who misses what it's all about,
Sick with injections, sees the 'tween-decks turn
To fields of home,each tree with its rustling shadow
Slipped like a young girl's dress down to its ankles;
Where lovers lay in chestnut shadows,
And horses came there from the burning meadows.
And these things stay, in seasonal rotation
Within the cycles of our false intention.
But others, lacking the power of reflection,
Broke ship, impelled by different emotions,
The police are seeking men of their description
As sedulously as their own promotion.

II
Before he sails a man may go on leave
To any place he likes, where he's unknown
Or where he's mentioned with a warm inflection
And hands are shaken up and down the street.
Some men avoid this act of recognition
And make the world a dartboard for their fling:
Oblivion is the colour of brown ale;
Peace is the backseat in the cinema.
But most men seek the place where they were born.

For me it was a long slow day by train.

Just here you leave this Cardiganshire lane,
Here by those milk churns and this telegraph pole,
Latch up the gate and cut across the fields.
Some things you see in detail, those you need;
The raindrops spurting from the trodden stubble
Squirting your face across the reaping meadow,
The strange machine-shaped scarab beetle
His scalloped legs clung bandy to a stalk,
The Jew's-harp bee with saddlebags of gold,
The wheat as thin as hair on flinty slopes,
The harsh hewn faces of the farming folks,
Opinion humming like a nest of wasps,
The dark-clothed brethren at the chapel gates;
And farther on the mortgaged crumbling farm
Where Shonni Rhys, that rough backsliding man
Has found the sheep again within the corn
And fills the evening with his sour oaths;
The curse of failure's in his shambling gait.
At last the long wet sands, the shelving beach,
The green Atlantic, far as eye can reach.
And what is here but what was always here
These twenty years, elusive as a dream
Flowing between the grinding-stones of fact -
A girl's affections or a new job lost,
A lie that burns the soft stuff in the brain,
Lust unconfessed, a scholarship let go
Or gained too easily, without much point -
Each hurt a search for those old country gods
A man takes with him in his native tongue
Finding a friendly word for all things strange,
The firm authentic truth of roof and rain.
And on the cliff's green brink where nothing stirs,
Unless the wind should stir it, I perceive
A child grow shapely in the loins I love.

III
In all the ways of going who can tell
The real from the unjustified farewell?
Women have sobbed when children left for school
Or husbands took the boat train to pursue
Contracts more tenuous than the marriage vow.
But now each railway station makes and breaks
The certain hold and drifts us all apart.
Some women know exactly what's implied.
Ten Years, they say behind their smiling eyes,
Thinking of children, pensions, looks that fade,
The slow forgetfulness that strips the mind
Of its apparel and wears down the thread;
Or maybe when he laughs and bends to make
Her laugh with him she sees that he must die
Because his eyes declare it plain as day.
And it is here, if anywhere, that words
- Debased like money by the same diseases -
Cast off the habitual cliches of fatigue
- The women hoping it will soon blow over,
The fat men saying it depends on Russia -
And all are poets when they say Goodbye
And what they say will live and fructify.
IV
And so we wait the tide, and when the dark
Laps round the swelling entrance to the sea
The grey evasive ship slips into line.
The bell clangs in the engine room, the night
Shrouds the cold faces watching at the rail,
Till suddenly from headland and from wharves
The searchlights throw their lambent bluish cloaks
Clothing the fairway in a sheen of silk.
The steel bows break, the churning screw burns white.
Each pallid face wears an unconscious smile.
And I - I pray my unborn tiny child
Has five good senses and an earth as kind
As the sweet breast of her who gives him milk
And waves me down this first clandestine mile.