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Note on Rum Lot

The epigraph is from Eugenio Montale’s La casa dei doganieri (‘The Coastguards’ House’). It has this line, which translates roughly as ‘the roll of the dice is no longer lucky’.

This is another of my poems about this particular skipper, the other being The Captain. I spoke in that piece of ‘the unscrupulous world of this merchant sailor’. I’m not sure that I’d ever develop him into a more complex character. It’s anyway convenient to have a heap of dramatic puppet-dolls in their costume baskets, ready to come dangling on as part-time egos or Aunt Sallys. I’m sometimes tempted to try out one of those artificial verse forms like the villanelle or sestina, but prefer forms of my own invention, as this is. The last line of each verse, as you can see, is a variant of the Italian epigraph. The old sea dog, a romantic codger from my boyhood daydreams, is one who has played life’s game seldom according to the book, who has in the end lost out, whose ship (his just deserts) came home but whose luck never did. He didn’t play by the rules.

Alan Marshfield

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