The poems of Jonathan Douglas play a small but important role in The Vanishing Age of Sail.
Jonathan was a peer of Kelsick Wood in 1830s Maryport and his verse helped me build a contemporary picture of life in the town. As the gentleman governor of the local workhouse, Jonathan was exposed to the lives of Maryport’s wealthiest and poorest residents, and as a poet he looked for the human connection between them all. The volume of his collected poems was published in 1836, while Kelsick’s shipwrights were working on the Campbell and the Bella Portena.
I tend to glaze over when faced with any passage of poetry (I do the same with the weather forecast), but as I became more immersed in life in Kelsick’s community, Jonathan’s words gradually came to life. He takes early morning walks on the hill behind the shipyard and watches the natural world awaken. He observes emigrants for America gathered anxiously on the town’s quay. Sea birds move among the frothy waves on the Solway Firth shoreline. Fishermen are lost to the Irish Sea. Maryport’s families laugh, love and grieve.
Jonathan Douglas was in declining health when he wrote his poetry. With the inevitability of his own death approaching, he had a fondness for eulogies and wrote several, including one marking the violent death of Kelsick’s son, Wilton. Occasionally (and rather unfairly) his eulogies remind me of Cacofonix, the lyre-playing bard in the Asterix books, tied down or silenced at a village feast as he began another heroic song. On flicking ahead to page 163 of his collection, the Wood family would have discovered this little gem, two hundred years before Monty Python’s dead parrot sketch:
ON THE DEATH OF A CANARY BIRD (extract)
Pretty bird with golden wing,
Never more we’ll hear thee sing,
Nor listen to the swelling note,
Warbling from thy mellow throat;
So lowly sweet – so loudly shrill,
And yet methinks I hear thee still.
References to Jonathan’s poems have been sparse over the last two hundred years, but he has not been entirely overlooked. He appears in A Literary Guide to the Lake District, where Grevel Lindop writes that ‘Douglas was no Wordsworth, but his Miscellaneous Poems (1836), mostly about Maryport, have a freshness, disarming honesty and lively observation of life…’ Mixed praise, but praise nonetheless.
Jonathan died in 1838 at the age of fifty, less than two years after the publication of his Miscellaneous Poems. His dutiful son Jonathan Percy was now called upon to write a eulogy for his late father.
Notes
- Miscellaneous Poems advert, Carlisle Journal, 6 August 1836. Reproduced with thanks to the British Newspaper Archive.
- Dead Canary (watercolour) by Patrick Syme (1774-1845). Reproduced with thanks to National Galleries of Scotland.
- A Literary Guide to the Lake District, Grevel Lindop (Chatto & Windus)
