Cicely Fox Smith

Cicely Fox Smith Poems

In a sailormen's restaurant Rotherhithe way,
Where the din of the docksides is loud all the day,
And the breezes come bringing off basin and pond
...

Oh, it is not in the papers and we cannot always know
Where to find the Silent Service whose address is 'G.P.O.'
And to-day you can't be certain wh ...
...

In Animal House (by which title I call
A dwelling whose true name is not that at all)
There are dogs on the sofas and cats on the chairs;
...

A thousand landmarks perish,
A hundred streets grow strange;
With all the dreams they cherish
They go the ways of change;
...

I'd tramped the whole day long on the weary roads ashore,
I was tired as a dog, and my heart was sick and sore,
...

Far down from the thunder
And rush of the street,
Flow Westbourne and Tyebourne
And Effra and Fleet,
...

Rosemary for remembrance, -
O gentle memories
Of hours whose fragrance is like flowers
In olden pleasaunces!
...

Fraser river's flooding high,
Cold and deep and cruel flowing,
All lonely stand the hills nearby,
And man may drown and no one knowing.
...

These are the men that sailed with me
In the Colonies clipper
Mary Ambree
...

The gnarled boughs hand darkling down,
And biers sweep my knees;
The moon is low, like a gold lamp,
Behind the twisted trees.
...

Good-bye and fare ye well; for we'll sail no more together,
Broad seas and narrow in fair or foul weather:
...

St. George for merry England!
Fair 'fall the cross of red,
Beneath whose folds, unyielding
...

Lovely is the white town, and smiling it lies
With little green gardens underneath the blue skies,
...

'Where I was born an' r'ared,' said Clancy,
'There was pigs an' cows an' such,' said he,
'House an' farm if I'd cared,' said Clancy,
...

The last night of November
All dreaming as I lay,
I saw a fisher toiling
In stormy seas and grey, -
...

When you are tired of the long road and the open sky,
I wish it may be my door that you're passing by:
...

Now, I fell in love with a Limehouse lass,
But she has proved untrue;
She looked as fresh as a figurehead
That's just been painted new;
...

'I don't want none of 'is stuff,' said Bill, 'nor I don't want none of 'is gear,
I don't want things as I've known 'im use nor things as I've
...

'To Ducklington,' the signpost read;
And 'That's the way for me,' I said,
For that (I thought) must surely be
A pleasant kind of place to see,
...

When I'm growing old (if I'm getting tired of sailing
Up and down the seas, and always finding something new),
...

Cicely Fox Smith Biography

Cicely Fox Smith (1 February 1882 – 8 April 1954) was an English poet and writer. Born in Lymm, Cheshire and educated at Manchester High School for Girls, she briefly lived in Canada, before returning to the United Kingdom shortly before the outbreak of World War I. She settled in Hampshire and began writing poetry, often with a nautical theme. Smith wrote over 600 poems in her life, for a wide range of publications. In later life, she expanded her writing to a number of subjects, fiction and non-fiction. For her services to literature, the British Government awarded her a small pension. Cicely Fox Smith was born 1 February 1882, into a middle-class family in Lymm, near Warrington, England during the latter half of the reign of Queen Victoria. Her father was a barrister and her grandfather was a clergyman. Smith well might have been expected to have a brief education and then to settle down to life as a homemaker either for her family or her marriage partner. She was well educated at Manchester High School for Girls from 1894 to 1897, where she described herself later as "something of a rebel," and started writing poems at a comparatively early age. In an article for the school magazine Smith later wrote "I have a hazy recollection of epic poems after Pope's Iliad, romantic poems after Marmion stored carefully away in tin tobacco boxes when I was seven or eight." All of that early work is lost unfortunately. She published her first book of verses when she was 17 and it received favourable press comments. Wandering the moors near her home she developed a spirit of adventure. She would follow the Holcombe Harriers[disambiguation needed] hunt on foot as a girl. She had a fierce desire to travel to Africa but eventually settled for a voyage to Canada. Smith likely sailed with her sister Madge in 1911 on a steamship to Montreal, where she would then have travelled by train to Lethbridge, Alberta, staying for about a year with her older brother Richard Andrew Smith before continuing on to British Columbia (BC). From 1912 to 1913 she resided in the James Bay neighbourhood of Victoria at the southern tip of Vancouver Island, working as a typist for the BC Lands Department and later for an attorney on the waterfront. Her spare time was spent roaming nearby wharves and alleys, talking to residents and sailors alike. She listened to and learned from the sailors' tales until she too was able to speak with that authoritative nautical air that pervades her written work. On 23 November 1913, Smith, with her mother and sister, arrived home in Liverpool aboard the White Star Line steamer Teutonic on the eve of World War I. She and her family then settled in Hampshire.)

The Best Poem Of Cicely Fox Smith

A Ship In A Bottle

In a sailormen's restaurant Rotherhithe way,
Where the din of the docksides is loud all the day,
And the breezes come bringing off basin and pond
And all the piled acres of lumber beyond,
From the Oregon ranges the tang of the pine
And the breath of the Baltic as bracing as wine …
Among the stale odours of hot food and cold,
In a fly-spotted window I there did behold
A ship in a bottle some sailor had made
In watches below, swinging South with the Trade,
When the fellows were patching old dungaree suits,
Or mending up oilskins and leaky sea-boots,
Or whittling a model, or painting a chest,
Or smoking and yarning and watching the rest.

In fancy I saw him - all weathered and browned,
Deep crows'-feet and wrinkles his eyelids around,
A pipe in the teeth that seemed little the worse
For Liverpool pantiles and stringy salt horse …
The hairy forearm with its gaudy tattoo
Of a bold-looking female in scarlet and blue …
The fingers all roughened and toughened and scarred,
With hauling and hoisting so calloused and hard,
So crooked and stiff you would wonder that still
They could handle with cunning and fashion with skill
The tiny full-rigger predestined to ride
To its cable of thread on its green-painted tide,
In its wine-bottle world while the old world went on,
And the sailor who made it was long ago gone.

And still as he worked at the toy on his knee
He would spin his old yarns of the ships and the sea,

Thermopylae
,
Lightning
,
Lothair
and
Red Jacket
,
And many another such famous old packet &mdash

And many a tough bucko and daredevil skipper
In Liverpool blood-boat and Colonies clipper -
The sail that they carried aboard the
Black Ball
,
Their skysails and stunsails and ringtail and all,
And storms that they weathered, and races they won,
And records they broke in the days that are done.

Or else he would sing you some droning old song,
Some old sailor's ditty both mournful and long,
With queer little curleycues, twiddles and quavers,
Of smugglers and privateers, pirates and slavers,
'The Brave Female Smuggler', the 'packet of fame'
That sails from New York, an' the '
Dreadnought's
her name',
And 'All on the coast of the High Barbaree',
And 'The flash girls of London were the downfall of he'.

In fancy I listened, in fancy could hear
The thrum of the shrouds and the creak of the gear,
The patter of reef-points on tops'ls a-shiver,
The song of the jibs when they tauten and quiver,
The cry of the frigate-bird following after,
The bow-wave that broke with a gurgle like laughter:
And I looked on my youth with its pleasure and pain,
And the shipmate I loved was beside me again …
In a ship in a bottle a-sailing away
In the flying-fish weather through rainbows of spray,
Over oceans of wonder by headlands of gleam
To the harbours of youth on the wind of a dream!

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