"The Capting" faces his "Ukulele Music"

Last October, in a post entitled "Deconstructing "Captain" Gordon Brown's Rhetoric", I quoted some lines from the sea shanty "Nancy Lee" :

"I sing you a tale of the Nancy Lee
A ship that got shipwrecked at sea
The bravest man was Captain Brown
Who played his ukulele as the ship went down

........All the crew were in despair
Some rushed here and others rushed there
But the Captain sat in the captain's chair
And he played the ukulele as the ship went down."

Today's national newspapers all suggest that it is time for the Prime Minister to face the music.

However, I want to reflect once again on the subject of my blog of yesterday, Tom Paulin's book "Minotaur : Poetry and the Nation State".

The concluding chapter of this book focuses on the work of the contemporary British poet, Peter Reading, and, in particular, his poem "Ukulele Music" and the figure of "The Capting". The poem poses the following question :

And shall it, now, be counted
as ye dignified defiance
in us towards our fateful
merciless element,
or gull naivete,
cousin to recklessness,
that, e'en in pitching Gulpward,
our salt kind brings forth chanteys ?

Paulin, in turn, offers the following reflection on this passage :

".... these lines carry a patriotic impulse as well as performing a kind of ritual absolution. In them we witness the the isolated, scarred and diminished soul of a great seafaring nation asking forgiveness after centuries of reckless imperialism. It's a hard request to answer and it perhaps betrays a sentimental softness for the imperial past*. We may be grateful, though, that the nation has found such a prolific laureate in Peter Reading. The imaginative risks he takes in confronting the state have a witty desperation and a strange but essentially confident poignancy that speaks in that phrase "our salt kind". It reminds me of Churchill's remark in May 1940 that the nation was as " sound as salt in the sea"".**

* A past unfortunately re-kindled in the imperialist foreign policy of the Blair Government and a UK banking system which swelled to leviathan proportions under "Capting" Brown's watch.

** The subjects of "soundness" (legal) and "SEA" (in this case "strategic environmental assessment") are tackled at my other blog : http://janetmackinnon.wordpress.com/