Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, SEAGULLS IN LONDON, JANUARY, 1940, by RUTH PITTER


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

SEAGULLS IN LONDON, JANUARY, 1940, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: They stormed upon me like catastrophe
Last Line: If this be folly, o forgive it me!
Subject(s): Birds; Forgiveness; Gulls; London; Clemency; Seagulls


They stormed upon me like catastrophe.
All fear of man was gone: scenting the food,
The harpy-crowd gathered and broke on me.
These, bred in solitude
Among the sea-pink in the salt sea-marsh,
Moated about by creeks of quaking slime
Lonelier than mountain deserts, now with harsh
Throats besought alms at this most bitter time.

My hands, cold-palsied, felt their crooked bills,
Their pirate sails struck on my stiffened cheek;
Their cold wet feet touched me with fleeting chills
Frail and inadvertent, that seemed to speak
For all the fury, of existence weak;
And one was lame,
Lagged on the turn, got nothing when he came.

Heart-withering hunger! how the terror whips
The shrinking mind! knowing ourselves curtailed,
More steel, less grain loading the threatened ships,
We, for whom plenty never yet has failed,
Feel the frore shadow of what famine now
Clutches the bowels of both foe and friend,
And while all Europe shudders in the snow
Dare not foresee, nor think upon the end.

And I am moved to ask you to forgive
If I have hope: if like a stubborn seed
The heart turns tough, determined still to live,
Made a mere dormant centre of the need
For bare existence, of the will to be:
If this is hardness, O forgive it me!

Pardon the faith, that will not be denied,
One with my life, and needing not a name,
That like these wings over the rushing tide
Beats upward, and not knowing whence it came
Battles with hunger, anguish, and the sea!
If this be folly, O forgive it me!





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