dad used to recite a poem to us when we were small. we’re having a memorial service for him in a month or so and I’d like to make up booklets of the poem, if I could find it. It begins as a seagoing tale of forty singing seamen on an old black barque. They’re lost and go ashore in Africa, where they encounter a phoenix, a unicorn, Prester John, polyphemus, and other characters, each more frightening than the last. Then they escape to their barque at a run and sail to safety.
Does this ring a bell with anyone? Author, possible places to search. It was probably something he memorized in high school in the 30s.
We were only simple seamen so of course we didn’t know.
We were only simple seamen so of course we couldn’t know.
this is the refrain that reappears frequently in the poem.
It’s a poem by Alfred Noyes.
http://www.peart.com/bartleby/mbp/58.html
You can take it from here.
http://www.google.com 
It may not be on the Web–you may have to go down to the library.
Thank you for your help. One of dad’s favorite sayings, which he would repeat apropos of nothing was “a noisome noise annoys an oyster.” Thus hiding in plain sight the name of the poet I was searching for. His favorite author was Poe, his favorite story, “The Purloined Letter.”
The Highwayman was one of my favorite poems in middle school. I set about to memorize it, but was soon distracted by other things. It’s rather startling to discover how close my tastes and inclinations were to my father’s.
One day he thrust into my hands The New Yorker, which contained a chapter by Updike from his work in progress called The Centaur. My life hasn’t been the same since. God bless Dad and Updike, Noyes and Poe, and you.
I discovered Noyes through Loreena McKennitt’s (very excellent) album The Book of Secrets. She set “The Highwayman” to music and sang it. Then I found a volume of Noyes poems at Second Story Books and brought it home for my daughter (since “The Highwayman” was her favorite song). “Forty Singing Seamen” is a real rollicking blast of doggerel, but since it contains the “N word” it would be taboo nowadays. My favorite Noyes poem is “Song” (When that I loved a maid/My world was in her eyes…).
Yes, and I’ve had a very hard time finding a version of Forty Singing Seamen published after the 1915 original publication. And I’m sure it’s because of that one word, which I imagine was perfectly acceptable in 1915. The other night I was stopped at a stoplight and a car pulled up beside me with the stereo grinding out rap that featured “the N word” every second or third line. Maybe it’s time to get over our knee jerk reaction to it. After all, the poem was written in dialect in the voice of an ignorant sailor in the dark ages. Huckleberry Finn features “Nigger” many dozens of times and it’s considered the greatest novel ever written by an American and certainly the seminal American novel that depicted an American sensibility and language–though the sensibility was pure hypocrisy and the language racist in the extreme.
I actually own Loreena McKennitt’s album but haven’t listened to it in years. My daughter hates it, so I put it aside. It’s not the songs she hates but McKennitt’s breathy, thin vocal style.
What’s thin is the ice you’re treading on, buddy. Nobody can dis Loreena the Goddess of Music in my presence and live!