The Last March

When I was younger, I became a fan of classical music. One of the pieces I listened to was Ralf Vaughan Williams' Symphonia Antarctica, a piece with five titled sections, each one a musical tone poem for part of the exploration of the South Pole by British explorer, Robert Falcon Scott. The reason it was segmented so was that Williams wrote this music as movie background, then published it as a symphony. It is bleak and cold, and beautiful. I was so fascinated by it that I went to the county library to look up Robert Falcon Scott and his ill-fated exploration of the South Pole that ended in the frozen death of he and his team eight miles from safety.

When the music was first published, it came with segments of different poetic works that the publisher hoped would be read while the section played, and match the mood of the music. Williams never authorized any specific readings to go with this music. I became fascinated by this challenge and decided to take a stab at it myself.

I have recently given my older poetry another look, revising what I wanted to keep. This is one of those works. As I revise each section, I will post it over the next four nights beginning with tonight. It is called The Last March and incorporates descriptions of what Scott saw and recorded in his journal, as well as lines from the journal itself.

I welcome any comments on this work, as I have with all of the other works I have posted.

The Last March
Christopher Bogart

The last exploration of Robert Falcon Scott
March 29, 1912



Prelude

White wasteland
Completely covers
And stretches out as far as the human eye can see,
For mile after endless mile
Until it disappears over the horizon.

There is a crystalline magnificence about the place,
And yet –
The cold.

A cold so deep
That it would seem to penetrate
The very fibers of anything
Not composed of ice as it is –
And crystallize perpetually
All that is alien to it.

Blue-white snow
Mounds into fantastic shapes,
Leviathans of land –
Yet no land at all –
Only snow.

Jagged black rock with coat of pristine iciness,
Lakes of thick, crusted ice,
And Ice,
As if it, being cold,
Were an elemental emperor
That has had its hiatus here.

Great white and slate-gray clouds
Breathe frozen wind
Across uninhabited desolation.

And the moaning…
The low, mournful,
Sonorous moaning of the wind,
Sings its spectral song, as it searches vainly
For life across the wilderness:
Like the Sirens of Homer-
Searching for prey
In this prey-less waste.

All the elements:
Cold, wind, ice and snow,
All exiles
Nature has driven to its polar extremes-
Silently await their final challenge
With the predator.

All, for eons
Of continuous non-existence
All await the presence
Of man.