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