Hymns to Neptune IV
“Shenandoah (The Wide Missouri)” was an early land ballad about a trader who wooed the daughter of an Indian chief and then left her on the shores of the wide Missouri. The song was taken to sea, perhaps by some of the peripatetic lumberjacks who worked in the woods in the winter and aboard ship during the summer. Without significant changes made in it, it finally became one of the most famous and widely sung of American shanties. Its rhythm is slow and rolling, like a long sea, its melody haunting, filled with the exile’s longing for his belovèd of his long-lost youth, and thus is a superb accompaniment for invocations of Neptune.
O Shenandoah, I long to hear you,
Away, my rolling river!
O Shenandoah I can’t get near you.
Away, away, I’m bound away,
’Cross the wide Missouri!
O Shenandoah, I love your daughter.
Away, my rolling river!
She lives across the stormy water.
Away, away, I’m bound away,
’Cross the wide Missouri!
For seven years I courted Sally,
Away, my rolling river,
For seven more I longed to have her,
Away, away, I’m bound away
’Cross the wide Missouri!
She said she would not be my lover.
Away, my rolling river!
Because I was a dirty sailor.
Away, away, I’m bound away,
’Cross the wide Missouri!
I’m drinkin’ rum and chewin’ ’baccer,
Away, my rolling river,
I’m drinkin’ rum and chewin’ baccer’,
Away, away, I’m bound away,
’Cross the wide Missouri!
O Shenandoah, I long to hear you,
Away, my rolling river,
A-comin’ back across the river,
Away, away, I’m bound away,
’Cross the wide Missouri!
John Paul Jones (1747-1792), founder of the United States Navy, was himself a man of enormous courage and vision. The latter is a traditional virtue of Neptune; the former exemplifies - again - Crowley’s reminder that “in the heart of Neptune is Mars.” The following quotation is historically accurate, having been thrown as a challenge to the British by the intrepid Welshman when the British attempted to board and seize Jones’s own ship, the Bonhomme Richard, of which he was captain at the time. Jones meant it. he won the battle - and was a good part of why the United States was able to become and remain a free an independent nation.
I have not yet begun to fight.
- John Paul Jones, aboard the Bonhomme Richard [September 23, 1779]
“The ultimate sacrifice.” “The last full measure of their devotion.” How many young heroes have gone down to the grave rather than abandon or betray their beloved land? Neptune rules sacrifice - especially the supreme sacrifice, the foremost representation of which was of course the death of Jesus of Nazareth on the Cross, the sacrifice of self and life in the service of a far greater Self and Life. Nathan Hale is one of countless superb exemplars of such sacrifice.
I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.
- Nathan Hale (1755-1776), last words before being hanged by the British as a spy [September 22, 1776]
“The Peat-Bog Soldiers (Die Moorsoldaten),” author unknown, was written in the Boergermoor Concentration Camp in Nazi Germany, where Germans who had run afoul of the Nazi regime were interned and used as slave-labor. The performance of this calm, grim song with its double meaning was first permitted and even encouraged at the prison, but once it had spread all over Germany and its real meaning - “Resistance or death!” - was made clear, it was banned at once. - As history shows, to no avail. This time, “in the heart of Neptune is Mars” translates as: “In the heart of the meanest prisoner or slave can live inconceivable courage that will endure until the very end.”
Far and wide as the eye can wander
Heath and bog are ev’rywhere.
Not a bird sings out to cheer us,
Oaks are standing gaunt and bare.
We are the peat-bog soldiers;
We’re marching with our spades
To the bog.
Up and down the guards are pacing,
No one, no one can go through.
Flight would mean a sure death-facing,
Guns and barbed-wire greet our view.
But for us there is no complaining,
Winter will in time be past;
One day we shall cry, rejoicing,
“Homeland dear, you’re mine at last!”
Then will the peat-bog soldiers
March no more with their spades
To the bog!
Wohin auch das Auge blicket,
Moor und Heide nur ringsum.
Vogelsang uns nicht erquicket,
Eichen stehen kahl und krumm.
Wir sind die Moorsoldaten,
Wir ziehen mit dem Spaten
Ins Moor.
“The Valley of Sleep” (from The Zodiac), by Hendrik Marsman (1899-1940). A. J. Barnouw, translator. In A Little Treasury of World Poetry: Translations from the Great Poets of Other Languages 2600 B.C. to 1950 A.D. (Hubert Creekmore, editor. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952), pp. 791-792. Neptune rules poetry, vision, transcendent beauty, sleep, hypnosis, dream - and horror, nightmare, and doom. “The Valley of Sleep” weaves its web of enchantment out of all these:
The dreams cross his sleep
As monsters the universe;
The moon is a beast that dies
In the shameless valley of clouds;
And he in whose brain’s soft part,
By the bite of the scorpion,
The fire of the spirit seeped
Through the bark’s smooth labyrinth,
Like poison in a thirsty sponge,
Feels at night the sweat of his thought
Break out in a crown of thorns,
Like a fungus, a Venus wreath.
Who shall lay a cloth on his head?
His skull throbs like a wound.
But no sponge with vinegar and gall
Kisses the tortured mouth.
* * * * * *
O flesh that sullies itself
With refinement’s flaccid flesh,
Be a plant again, rushing weed
In the waters of Nature’s black stream.
All words evaporate,
And the seed that ought to bear fruit
In a flowering woman’s womb
Pines away in the boyish frame
Of the polished hermaphrodite,
The hetaera who murders the growth;
Do not sleep with the intellect,
Do not couple with a cold womb.
For a brood of adders was aye
The fruit that inbreeding bred.
And also the child of the mind
Shall go the way of all flesh.
See, the moon has sullied the script
That your pen drove into the sheet.
The verse too that drains your bones
Of their marrow is short-lived as grass.
Sink away in the valley of sleep,
In the world’s original mould, -
A nameless lethargy,
An unfathomed oblivion.
“The Sea Dike,” by M. Vasalis (1908-?). Translated by A. J. Barnouw. In A Little Treasury of World Poetry: Translations from the Great Poets of Other Languages 2600 B.C. to 1950 A.D., op. cit., pp. 792-793. Neptune rules the Ocean Sea, the wild, untamable thing that was Life’s womb, and ultimately makes a mockery of every would-be attempt at immortality by the tectonically ambitious land. Though temporarily Neptune can apparently be broken to harness, bridled, saddled, ridden for pleasure or impressed for work, as the Dutch, among others, have done, eventually He always breaks out of His paddock, tears out of His harness, kicks over the loads He is made to pull, and regains His freedom in wild, destructive storms of exultant fury. The Dutchman M. Vasalis, who, like all his countryman, lived his life in a strange, tense relationship to the sea, dammed and diked as it has been by the Netherlanders, knew that fact well. This poem of his subtly hints at the real power of Neptune that lies hidden just beneath the tamed, diked-in surface over which the bus in which the speaker is travelling moves. Neptune rules subtlety and concealed power; this poem exemplifies both.
The bus rides like a room across the night.
The road is straight, the dike is without end.
At left the sea, tamed but recalcitrant.
A little moon distils a delicate light.
In front of me the young, close-shaven necks
Of a couple of sailor boys. They do their best
To stifle yawns, they stretch their arms and legs,
And on each other’s shoulders drop to rest.
Then dreamily there drifts into my ken
The ghost of this bus, transparent glass
Riveted to ours, now clear, and then again
Half-drowned in the misty sea. The glass
Cuts straight through the sailors. Then I see pass
Myself as well. Only my face
Is drifting on top of the surface swell
And moves its mouth as if it would tell
A story and could not, a mermaid distressed.
There is to this journey, I feel somehow,
Neither start nor finish, only at best
This strangely split unending Now.