“The Other Mariners” (1960) is a relatively early work by Patricia Beer, a Devon poet born to a Plymouth Brethren family, and inclined all her life to tackle religious and natural themes with a power of perception that bordered on the ruthless. She wrote seven collections of poetry, a strange but beautiful novel (Moon’s Ottery) and one volume each of autobiography and criticism. She excluded “The Other Mariners” from her Collected Poems, published in 1988, perhaps because it shows too clearly the influence of the preceding decades in its salty catch of sea-myth references. Every life-wrecked sailor from Jonah to the Ancient Mariner seems to breathe through the poem’s rolling argument about survivor’s guilt, though the riddling quality also owes something, I think, to the Seafarer of the Exeter Book. Beer’s style simplified as she wrote more freely in the 1960s and 70s; she grew less willing to obscure images with metaphysics. But her gift for animating metaphor with sudden drama (very much the Coleridgian tactic) shines through these few balladic stanzas whose desolating last line curls and repeats with a wave-like inevitability.

The Other Mariners

I am the mariner who killed,
Unlike most murderers,
Because I wished to keep good luck
Stowed safely behind bars.
I did not reckon on the death
Of the other mariners.

I who dredged God out of sea
Extinguished all their prayers.
I found grace in an element
Quite different from theirs
And bought forgiveness with the coin
Of the other mariners.

But why did they resent my soul
A thing that no-one shares?
Were they more worthy of my fate
With its unchosen cares?
How welcome to redemption were
The other mariners!

If the surviival of one man
Amongst the death of scores
Is commonplace in time of plague
And everyday in wars
Why was mine singled out with oaths
By the other mariners?

Salvation, being a selfish thing,
Knows neither us nor ours.
I do not blame myself or death,
I blame the saving powers
Who made me see the face of God
Not the other mariners.

PATRICIA BEER (1960)

To read last week's Poem of the Week, "Edward Lear" by W. H. Auden, click here.

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