Cargoes was published in 1903 by John Masefield

Quinquireme1 of Nineveh2 from distant Ophir,3 Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,4 ,With a cargo of ivory ,And apes and peacocks Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine................ 5 Stately Spanish galleon5 coming from the Isthmus,6 ,Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores ,With a cargo of diamonds Emeralds, amethysts,7 Topazes,8 and cinnamon, and gold moidores.9..................10 ,Dirty British coaster10 with a salt-caked11 smoke stack ,Butting through the Channel12 in the mad March days ,With a cargo of Tyne13 coal Road-rails, pig-lead,14 Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays............................15

:Notes

quinquireme: Large Greek, Roman, or Carthaginian ship used....1 between the first and fourth centuries B.C. to wage war and haul cargo. Three tiers of oarsmen on each side of the ship propelled the .vessel. On its bow was a ram to batter enemy ships Nineveh: Capital city of the ancient empire of Assyria. Nineveh was....2 .on the east bank of the Tigris River in present-day Iraq Ophir: Fabled land of gold referred to in the Bible in the books of....3 .Genesis, Kings, and Chronicles Palestine: In ancient times, a region on the eastern coast of the....4 .Mediterranean galleon: Three - or four- masted sailing vessel used to wage war....5 and haul cargo. It was developed between 1400 and 1600. Spain and .Portugal built the largest ships of this type Isthmus: Strip of land in a body of water that connects two large....6 land masses. In the poem, Isthmus refers to the Isthmus of Panama, which connects North and South America. In the 15th and 16th centuries, it used to carry goods from America to Europe and Spain .particularly amethyst: Purple variety of the mineral quartz, valued as a....7 .semiprecious gem .topazes: Gems formed from a hard mineral. Yellow Topaz....8 .moidores: Gold coins minted by Portugal, beginning in about 1640....9 coaster: Vessel that ferries cargo and passengers from one point to..10 .another along a coast .salt-caked: Caked with salt from the sea .11 .Channel: English Channel, between England and France .12 Tyne: River in northern England formed in Northumberland from the .13 confluence of the North Tyne River and the South Tyne River. As it flows to the North Sea, it passes through coal fields. Ships plying the Tyne frequently carried coal. He mentions this river because it is a mining area the most important city in terms of coal mines at .that time was New castle

Pig-Lead: Crude lead extracted from ore and poured from a .14 smelting furnace into an oblong mold to form a block of lead known as .a pig

Background -1 John Masefield was born in Ledbury in 1878, England. After attending Kings School in Warwick, he went to sea at age fifteen on a large sailing ship, then worked for a time in New York City before returning to England in 1897. His experiences aboard the ship provided him the raw material that made him famous as a sea poet. In 1902, (other resources say it was in 1903), he published a collection of sea poems entitled Salt-Water Ballads, in which Cargoes appeared. He died in .1967 Type of Work and Structure -4 Cargoes" is a lyric poem with three stanzas, each with five lines. The" stanzas are alike in structure. For example, the first line of each stanza identifies a type of ship at sea, and the second linebeginning with an action verb ending in -ingidentifies a locale. The third line, a prepositional phrase, begins to list items in the cargo; the fourth and fifth lines complete the list. The second and fifth lines of each stanza .end in masculine rhyme

Masculine rhyme: A rhyme consisting of a single stressed syllable, as in the rhyme between car and far, in the poem white wine. Whereas Feminine rhyme: A rhyme consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable, as in the rhyme between mother .and brother

In each stanza, the first line has twelve syllables and the second line has eleven syllables. Notice also that the first line of each stanza omits

the indefinite article (a) before the first word. None of the stanzas has .a complete sentence. The stanzas are in chronological order (?Theme (what is the poem about Two stages of development He is presenting a history form ancient time to the present by giving us a vivid cargoes starting from the pretty quinquiruim Spanish galleons to the dirty British cargoes. There are two stages in the poem; the pretty image of ivory and diamond to the different image of coal. The image is positive in the first two stanzas but negative in the third last one. The last three lines of the first two stanzas present concrete images of cargoes from distant landsfor example, ivory, peacocks, sandalwood, white wine, emeralds, and cinnamonthat facilitate luxurious living. Lines 3-5 of the last stanza, on the other hand, present examples of commonplace practical products from nearby locales to .maintain the mundane life of the masses Growth and Development There is a sense of development. From the first to the third stanzas there is growth and development. The first stanzas Palestine was an area that included the Kingdom of Israel, a rather small empire by later standards such as Portuguese and British. Still, Israel was made rich by conquering areas around it and enslaving its peoples. Solomon employed these slaves, according to Kings I of the Bible, to build his cities. By the time Spain was an imperial power, enabled by the Pope who gave it rights to the Western world, Spain controlled a large part of North and South America. The later British Empire was even larger, penetrating into America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. But as empires grew and developed, they also fell. By the time of the British coaster in stanza three, Britain had become a large factory, processing not only materials from the rest of the globe, but also from those it cut down and mined in its own country. Instead of just importing goods from other climes to make itself wealthy as Israel and Spain had, Britain was destroying itself in order to make itself rich. With the Industrial Revolution, Britain had turned itself into a noisy, grimy .machine that turned development into a dirty word

Style Its three, five-line stanzas follow an unusual abcdb rhyme scheme. The first, second, and fifth lines of every stanza are best read with three feet to a line (trimeter), though some lines, such as the first line, are comfortably read with four feet (tetrameter). All of the stanzas third and fourth lines have two feet (diameter). The poems rhythm at the beginning of the first, third, and fifth lines of each stanza mostly follows a form called the paeon, which is a foot with one accented syllable followed by three unaccented syllables: QUIN qui reme of / NI ne veh from. In actuality, the accents, in stair-step or wave-like fashion, gradually fall or descend in the words quinquireme and Nineveh, then slightly rise with the preposition before rising still higher with the beginning of the next foot. The rhythm is thus a gradual movement from unaccented to accented syllables and viceversa, much like the repetitiously gentle dipping and rising of peaceful ships at sea. Things change, however, at the third foot of most of the first, second, and fifth lines of each stanza. Here, we usually come upon what is called a mollossus, a foot with three consecutive strong :beats as in lines 1, 7, and 15 / distant Ophir / / palm-green shores / / cheap tin trays / Lines with two feet follow different variations of iambs, anapests, trochees, and dactyls. In the following line there are two feet of :dactyls, a first accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables Emeralds, / Amethysts :But in the following line there are two trochaic feet Road-rails/ pig-lead Finally, there is the repetition of sounds. For instance, in lines 6 and 11, an s sound dominates. In line 5 a w sound repeats. Throughout the poem, there are instances of repeated vowel sounds, called assonance (firewood, iron-ware); repeated consonant sounds, called consonance (salt-caked smoke stacks); and repeated sounds at the

beginning of words, called alliteration (salt-caked smoke stacks). The repetition of these sounds not only feel good in the mouth, but along with regularities of stanzas and lines, it pulls disparate parts of the poem together into different unities. One might think of the poem itself as a ship carrying and storing different kinds of poetic cargo in similar .places