Poem: Musings On a Lighthouse Near an Eastern Isle

It is bright tonight; this plain, displaced from place
In Time's broad flight, wields nothing to the strains
Of air, no marbled hand unstrafed by rains
Or gales retraced through past days' shaded waste.
Great things may fall; through all life's vagrant seas
Drift things so small we pass them as they fly-
Yet a man may have no memories of these:
Things carved against doom's deep shall last yet die.
What listless whispers from the winds are these,
That lead thoughts prior to pass of fortune's page?
All death's a dream that fades upon the stage
That raised strayed sails, to strange eternities.

Beneath the wreaths of green and Eastern skies
That wheeled through fields of liquid emerald,
Your range of years, white watcher of the world,
Perennial as the fires that marked your rise,
Had outfaced an age. Your pale palladium
To those who'd tamed the treason of the seas
Awaits no voice of time's now but the thrum
Of waves, cast far from strands and galaxies.
In lampless lands where sunlight never glides,
Your eye gone out, what man may mourn you now,
No guiding height by weightless Wain or Plough,
No land-bound star and temptress to the tides?

Now hushed beneath the breezes and the bays,
Now shut from all the seasons touched by sun,
Your plinth's height through its Hepastadion
Could not forestall your fall; your starboard rays
Had reached at length your fatal yield of years;
The spells that stars cast pass but won't reverse.
Had a shape been traced in space that sigiled tears,
That had passed across the looming universe
For prophets' tongues? They seem to live where press
The currents that succumb or beat their breasts,
Past lightless realms where suns are rocked to rest-
That rise to leave your shipless wilderness.

Faint Pharos, shall men ring your name once more,
Or praise the safeguard of light's beaten breath?
Some things, it seems, are only born for death:
You seemed as ageless as your salt-lipped shore.
What bronze-thewed youth or white-haired wanderer,
From lands unguided now through floodlit seas,
Rides by raftered strands to Alexandria,
Over windless ways no steep sun seeks or sees?
Detained past hope and range of loss and rage,
Corrode to pumiced stone, and turn from sight:
O voiceless watcher once through lanes of light
On night-bound paths: to narrowed straits of age.
About:Iain James Robb was born in Greenock, Scotland, in January, 1976. For many years he harboured ambitions to be an artist, but replaced those ambitions with literary ones. Between the ages of fifteen and eighteen he wrote a novel, which wound up destroyed, and he turned to poetry instead. He has ambitions of being a critic if his poetry is printed, and of being the writer of a decent-selling sci-fi book....

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Clive WatkinsJun 10th, 2007 - 19:00:45

Hmmmm, this reeks of Swinburne with a bit of Keats thrown in for good measure, the scope of language is to be commended but the sentiments within are somewhat trite and undisciplined. Lighthouse is a poem that certainly warrants possible publishing and I would like to see more poems from its author if possible, even though the sentiments are suspect the vision of it clearly stems from a mind that is sharp and lucid, refreshing but at the same time unsettling, and in this modern age of Poetry controversy is the name of the game

Regards

Clive Watkins

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Jessica Schneider (M&C)Jun 11th, 2007 - 22:17:58

A nice use of the classical without sounding trite.

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I J RobbJun 12th, 2007 - 15:00:26

Thanks for reading this, Clive and Jessica. It's taken some time, but my work is not as erratic as it used to be, perhaps because I write less, perhaps because my amalgam of interests is wider: perhaps because I expend more thought when adding lines to a poem.

To J: I like your 'From the Box of the Zoo Fox' and 'Moth in a Laboratory' poems. If they haven't been printed yet, they stand a good chance of being accepted in magazines.

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Jessica Schneider (M&C)Jun 12th, 2007 - 15:21:20

Thanks. Glad you enjoyed reading them. Maybe someday they will find a home somewhere fancy.

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Vic KytziaMay 3rd, 2009 - 16:51:36

absolutely brilliant work!

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