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    The Old Ships: "I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep"
    The Old Ships: "I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep"
    The Old Ships: "I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep"
    Ebook35 pages27 minutes

    The Old Ships: "I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep"

    By James Elroy Flecker

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    About this ebook

    James Elroy Flecker was born on 5th November 1884, in Lewisham, London.

    Flecker does not seem to have enjoyed academic study and achieved only a Third-Class Honours in Greats in 1906. This did not set him up for a job in either government service or the academic world.

    After some frustrating forays at school teaching he attempted to join the Levant Consular Service and entered Cambridge to study for two years. After a poor first year he pushed forward in the second and achieved First-Class honours. His reward was a posting to Constantinople at the British consulate.

    However, Flecker’s poetry career was making better progress and he was beginning to garner praise for his poems including The Bridge of Fire. Unfortunately, he was also showing the first symptoms of contracting tuberculosis. Bouts of ill health were to now alternate with periods of physical well-being woven with mental euphoria and creativity.

    Before his early death he managed to complete several volumes of poetry, which he continually revised, together with some prose works and plays. It was a small canon of work but on his death on 3rd January 1915, of tuberculosis, in Davos, Switzerland he was described as "unquestionably the greatest premature loss that English literature has suffered since the death of Keats".

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPortable Poetry
    Release dateFeb 1, 2018
    ISBN9781787377318
    The Old Ships: "I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep"

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      Book preview

      The Old Ships - James Elroy Flecker

      The Old Ships by James Elroy Flecker

      James Elroy Flecker was born on 5th November 1884, in Lewisham, London.

      Flecker does not seem to have enjoyed academic study and achieved only a Third-Class Honours in Greats in 1906.  This did not set him up for a job in either government service or the academic world. 

      After some frustrating forays at school teaching he attempted to join the Levant Consular Service and entered Cambridge to study for two years. After a poor first year he pushed forward in the second and achieved First-Class honours. His reward was a posting to Constantinople at the British consulate.

      However, Flecker’s poetry career was making better progress and he was beginning to garner praise for his poems including The Bridge of Fire.  Unfortunately, he was also showing the first symptoms of contracting tuberculosis. Bouts of ill health were to now alternate with periods of physical well-being woven with mental euphoria and creativity.

      Before his early death he managed to complete several volumes of poetry, which he continually revised, together with some prose works and plays. It was a small canon of work but on his death on 3rd January 1915, of tuberculosis, in Davos, Switzerland he was described as unquestionably the greatest premature loss that English literature has suffered since the death of Keats.

      Index of Contents

      The Old Ships

      The Blue Noon

      A Fragment

      Narcissus

      Stillness

      The Pensive Prisoner

      Hexameters

      Philomel

      From Jean Moréas' Stances

      The Princess

      Pannyra of the Golden Heel

      The Gate of the Armies

      The Old Warship Ablaze

      November Eves

      God Save the King

      The Burial in England

      The True Paradise

      An Essay on James Elroy Flecker

      James Elroy Flecker – A Short Biography

      James Elroy Flecker – A Concise Bibliography

      THE OLD SHIPS

      I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep

      Beyond the village which men still call Tyre,

      With leaden age o'ercargoed, dipping deep

      For Famagusta and the hidden sun

      That rings black Cyprus with a lake of fire;

      And all those ships were certainly so old

      Who knows how oft with squat and noisy gun,

      Questing brown slaves or Syrian oranges.

      The pirate Genoese

      Hell raked them till they rolled

      Blood, water, fruit and corpses up the hold.

      But

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