Poem of the week – The Razor Shell by Vernon Watkins

Vernon Watkins is a largely forgotten poet. Ironically, his long association with Faber & Faber led to some critics accusing him of being over-published. Unlike his friend and contemporary, Dylan Thomas, he never produced a single stellar poem or a piece attractive enough to garner persistent popular attention and praise. Nonetheless, Thomas described Watkins as “the most profound and greatly accomplished Welshman writing poems in English”. His editor, TS Eliot, sent several notes of commendation revealing Watkins’s artistic stature in the eyes of his most revered contemporaries.  Watkins was also an “early encourager” of Philip Larkin and an authority on Yeats, Wordsworth and Thomas.

Watkins lived a professional poetic life, reserving at least two hours in the evening for composition. Highly capable, he was employed as a cryptographer at Bletchley Park, where he met his wife. Not long before he died in 1967, he was tipped to receive the laureateship. Had he lived a while longer, he may have reached the summits of fame that his friend Dylan Thomas achieved.

Fame, thankfully, is not the ultimate aim of every poet. The satisfaction of producing good and alluring work must trump the ephemeral charm of celebrity in the minds of devout and diligent creators of poetry. Watkins wrote many impressive verses, exploring various forms while demonstrating a modest mastery over whatever structure he elected to use.

This week’s poem was included in Penguin’s British Poetry Since 1945 anthology. The Razor Shell recognises the blending process of nature that begets singular things. The powers of skies, seas, winds and time are all evident in the spiralling harmony of a tawny razor shell, couched in golden sand upon a beach. Watkins turns the shell into a symbol of individuation in nature by lending this silent object a human sense of self. We hope you enjoy this week’s poem as much as we did.

The Razor Shell

I am the long, lean razor shell:

Do not interpret me too soon.

Streak of the wind with tawny stains,

The sky’s quill-feather marked my grooves,

The sea is hidden in my veins.

I am a part of all that moves,

And more than this, of what remains.

Here on the sand in burning noon

I lie, forgotten by the swell.

I hear the breakers and the oars

Falling along the level shores

And beating down the golden grains.

Let Solomon consider well

And take me cool into his hand,

Then ask, before he count the sand:

What is that labour to the moon?