The Stoker
Reading edition
While a student at college, I voyaged to Naples in the steerage of an Italian liner. That was long before the days of the modern oil burner and the engine room was a fair reproduction of Dante’s Inferno. One afternoon a young stoker, begrimed and perspiring, crept up the iron ladder from the stoke hold and sat for a few minutes gazing out of an open port. His wistful face remains a vivid memory and occasioned the following lines.
Framed in the iron port there looms a face That Rembrandt’s stilus or the sombre muse Of Dante might have etched. Pale cheeks and eyes That gaze unseeing, out - a forehead damp With sweat and smeared with grime - a haunting face Through which there peers in wistful apathy A parched and withered soul. Some stoker crept, Gasping for air up from that hell below, Of lurid fires and gloom, where engines groan Like blinded Titans, and with giant strength Shoulder the huge hulk forward through the brine. What thoughts beguile the furrows of that brow Does he perchance, recall the sunlit days Of childhood in some cottage gay with flowers Where Italy, enthroned among her rocks Broods o’er her vanished grandeur? Does the spell Of romance conjure up the golden past When his proud forbears bore the pomp of Rome To seas remote, when Roman legions ruled The servile world? Did he in flaunting crest, And burnished armour tread the galley deck? Or did a scourging destiny condemn His pain wracked shoulders to the oaken oar? To his dulled ears float strains of music sweet From gilded cabins where the zest of life Enthralls the voyagers, while his the hand That drives the moving palace on her course Through seas of shimmering light. A gnome begrimed, Breathing foul dust and blistered by the heat In caverns far below. A galley slave Heaving and straining at a deadlier oar - An iron bar that burns the calloused palm. Whene’er the furnace gapes its dragon jaws And blasts him with its breath, with reckless hand He flings his youth into that Moloch’s maw! And his reward? O bargain infamous A mess of pottage for a birth right riven Like Esau’s ancient sin. Repulsive fare A stinking hole to kennel like a cur Battling with vermin, foul and desperate Too bitter punishment for branded crime. Chained by the manacles of circumstance To Vulcan’s smoking forge, a fate more dire Than once befell Prometheus wracked upon His cross of crags on grizzled Caucausus; With every shovel speed the winged hours His hopes, his dreams, his life but sordid lumps Of coal to feed those flames insatiate. Then Death, the pitiful, brings welcome rest. His body, warped and shrivelled, slides adown The tilted hatchway, weighted at the feet A burned out clinker cast into the sea!