Poems

The old fisherman’s limbs have lost their strength, and the sea spray barely reaches him on the shore. As he looks back on the life he once sang through, what can hope still promise the lonely and old?

Matilda Betham’s early nineteenth-century poems move from a fisher’s humble cottage to the Gothic imaginings inspired by Ann Radcliffe, from a fading rose to a young heir exiled from home. Their speakers meet love, grief, restless melancholy and the uneasy passage of time in voices that are intimate, tender and sometimes haunted. In “The Old Fisherman,” a bereaved father clings to memories of the family who once welcomed him home, while the sea that sustained him also holds its dangers. Across these poems, affection and sorrow are never far apart—and even quiet images seem to carry a hidden ache. What might remain when the heart has endured more than it can bear?

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