Shipbuilding

Is it worth it?
A new winter coat and shoes for the wife
And a bicycle on the boy’s birthday.
It’s just a rumour that was spread around town
By the women and children,
Soon we’ll be shipbuilding.

Well, I ask you,
The boy said ‘Dad they’re going to take me to task,
But I’ll be back by Christmas’.
It’s just a rumour that was spread around town.
Somebody said that someone got filled in
For saying that people get killed in
The result of this shipbuilding.

With all the will in the world,
Diving for dear life
When we could be diving for pearls.

It’s just a rumour that was spread around town,
A telegram or a picture postcard,
Within weeks they’ll be re-opening the shipyards
And notifying the next of kin
Once again.
It’s all we’re skilled in.
We will be shipbuilding.

With all the will in the world,
Diving for dear life
When we could be diving for pearls.

Elvis Costello and Clive Langer, ‘Shipbuilding’ (1983).

First sung as a single by Robert Wyatt, later sung by Elvis Costello on his album Punch the Clock. The song’s subject is the Falklands War.

To Cynthia, on concealment of her beauty

Do not conceal, nor yet eclipse
Thy pearly teeth with coral lips;
Lest that the seas cease to bring forth
Gems, which from thee have all their worth.

Sir Francis Kynaston, ‘To Cynthia, on concealment of her beauty’ (1642), sixth stanza

Vanitie

The nimble Diver with his side
Cuts through the working waves, that he may fetch
His dearly-earned pearl, which God did hide
On purpose from the ventrous wretch;
That he might save his life, and also hers,
Who with excessive pride
Her own destruction and his danger wears.

George Herbert, ‘Vanitie (I)’ (1633), second stanza

Illuminations

… we are dealing here with something which may not be unique but is certainly extremely rare: the gift of thinking poetically.

And this thinking, fed by the present, works with the ‘thought fragments’ it can wrest from the past and gather about itself. Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths, and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past – but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things ’suffer a sea-change’ and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living – as ‘thought fragments,’ as something ‘rich and strange,’ and perhaps even as everlasting Urphänomene.

Hannah Arendt, introduction to Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (1970).

This is the final paragraph of Hannah Arendt’s introduction to a collection of Walter Benjamin’s essays. The introduction is divided into three parts, the third and final part having the title ‘The Pearl Diver’ with Shakespeare’s ‘Full Fathom Five’ as an epigraph. Urphänomene means ‘elemental phenomena’, a concept developed by Goethe.

Desiderium

Let others trust the seas, dare death and hell,
Search either Inde, vaunt of their scarres and wounds;
Let others with their deare breath (nay silence) sell
To fools, and (swoln, not rich) stretch out their bounds
By spoiling those that live, and wronging dead;
That they may drink in pearl, and couch their head
In soft, but sleeplesse down; in rich, but restlesse bed.

Phineas Fletcher, ‘Desiderium’, part of The Purple Island (1633), Canto I, stanza 26.

Phineas Fletcher was an English divine and poet. The Purple Island is a long allegorical poem. The section from which this stanza comes contrasts the vanities of courtly life with the simple life of a shepherd, ‘under some Kentish hill’.