F.T. Prince

I think his name was in my passive memory, because when I saw his Collected Poems in the Hverfisagata bookshop I thought, 'Hmm, F.T. Prince, where have I heard that name before?' He died in 2003, and here is an obituary. I certainly recognised the first line of Soldiers Bathing, which they say is his most famous poem. But the rest are quite good too. Here are two little early ones.

To My Sister

I said that you should stint your wit,
But you were right to answer
That seldom could a beauty sit
When born to be a dancer.

You are richest when you scatter pearls,
When with an eagerness
More like a sea-gull's than a girl's,
You make your voyages.

Go on, and with your wealth amaze
And still the watcher. No man
When she'd be so, as Balzac says,
Should interrupt a woman.

False Bay

She I love leaves me, and I leave my friends
In the dusky capital where I spent two years
In the cultivation of divinity.
Sitting beside my window above the sea
In this unvisited land I feel once more
How little ingenious I am. The winter ends,
The seaward slopes are covered to the shore
With a press of lilies that have silver ears.
And although I am perplexed and sad, I say
'Now indulge in no dateless lamentations;
Watch only across the water the lapsed nations
And the fisherman twitch a boat across the bay.'