Forgotten Ground Regained
A Song of the Petrel
(translated from the Russian of Maxim Gorky, 1868-1936)
Wind-called clouds crowd up to coverthe grey wave-waste. Wheeling betweenthe pride of the cloud and the press of the seais the proud petrel, black-lighting-bolt.He screams skimming the scattered surf,and the bold call of the bird comesto the cloud’s ear as clear gladness.Cry of thirst, this, thirst for tempest!A cry is in the clouds of fury’s force,of fire in passion and trust to triumph.Seagulls in the storm shudder to moaning,moaning their seafaring, and in their surfseeingare ready to bury sea-bottom-deeptheir terror of the tempest. The loons too mourn,the blows of thunder burst their hearts,battle-pleasures of unapproachable life.The poor fearful penguin scuttlesWith his plump plumage to the rocks. Alonethe proud petrel is poised free,bold above the foam-pale sea.Still lower bowed, still blacker loured,The clouds are closing over the waves;The waves are whistling, and their whipped crestsmount with thought to meet the thunder;to thunder-grumble wave-rage-groaningspeaks in the teeth and strife of the wind;see the wind seize in embrace of forceits flocks of billows and rush them on the rockswith wild spite and swing, burstingthe be-emeralded sea-mass to dust and spume!The petrel planes, black-lightning-bolt,And cries as he climbs to the clouds like an arrow,and sings as he swoops on the foam of the waves.Some spirit of blackness he as he soars:Spirit of the storm, laughing, sobbing,laughing at the clouding, sobbing with rejoicing;spirit-sensitive through that threat of thunderto long-waiting weariness upon the watersbut waiting in will for the sure unshrouding,The assured unshrouding and unclouding of the sun.Winds howl to thunder’s growl;clouds piled blazing in pyre of blueflock above the unfathomed sea;the sea seizing the lighting streaksquenches them plunged in its cavers,and the javelin-images over the wavesquiver as they vanish like vipers in fire.The storm is breaking into full being!There flies the fearless petrel in his pridethrough lightning and over the wave-wrath-roaringand there like a prophet cries triumphing‘Let the tempest be unloosed to its last tide!’
Part of Forgotten Ground Regained: A Journal of Alliterative Verse,
Issue 8, Fall, 2025: Norse and Icelandic Forms
Note from the Editor:
This poem is not in any historic form. It is what Dennis W. Wise, in his Speculative Poetry and the Alliterative Revival, calls impressionistic alliterative verse. (It is probably about 6 or 7 of 10 on his scale from impressionism to faithfulness of alliterative form; occasionally, the lines break from the overall alliterative pattern.) Like Jocasta, it imitates Old English rather than Old Norse Poetry formally. Once again: long four-stress lines that can be broken into half-lines, and no stanzas.
However, this poem does call up the feeling of Northernness, of the wild North Sea that the Vikings dared, through its liberal use of alliterative lines with clashing stresses and compound nouns that aren’t quite kennings but have much the same feel. Edwin Morgan steeped himself in that Northern world, and this poem gives a sense of the power that can come from capturing not merely the metrical form but the spirit behind the form. Keep that power in mind as you read through the rest of issue 8.
Copyright © Estate of Edwin Morgan, 1952.
This poem first appeared in The Vision of Cathkin Braes (1952) and was reprinted in The Collected Poems of Edwin Morgan. Reprinted with the permission of Carcanet Press.
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