O — ship in a bottle
with masts erect and spars all set and sails spread
how you remind me of my London friends,
O — ships in bottles!
Little fleets
that put to sea on certain evenings,
frigates, barks and pinnaces, yawls
all beautifully rigged and bottled up
that put to sea and sink Armadas
in a pub parlour, in literary London, on certain evenings.
O — small flotilla of sorry souls
sail on, over perilous seas of thought,
cast your little anchors in ports of eternity,
then weigh, and out to the infinities,
skirting the poles of being and of not-being.
Ah, in that parlour of the London pub
what dangers, ah, what dangers!
Caught between great icebergs of doubt
they are all but crushed
little ships.
Nipped upon the frozen floods of philosophic despair
high and dry.
Reeling in the black end of all beliefs
they sink.
Yet there they are, there they are,
little ships
safe inside their bottles!
Whelmed in profundities of profound conversation,
lost between great waves of ultimate ideas
they are - why there they are,
safe inside their bottles!
Safer than in the arms of Jesus!
Oh, safer than anything else is a well-corked, glassy ego,
and sounder than all insurance is a shiny mental conceit!
Sail, little ships in your glass bottles,
safe from every contact,
safe from all experience,
safe, above all, from life!
And let the nodding tempests of verbosity
weekly or twice-weekly whistle round your bottles.
Spread your small sails immune, little ships!
The storm is words, the bottles never break.