In nearly every successful self-picked group, there’s one member who maybe isn’t as purely talented as the others but gets along with everyone: someone who can crack a joke and liven up a party. That person has to be good enough to join the group, but once that hurdle has been cleared, “fun to be with” counts as much as anything else. 

If you’ve ever looked at successful rock groups, you know the phenomenon, but among writers, there may be no better example than James Thomas Fields (1817–1881). This was a man with his fingers in just about everything literary in 19th-century America. He was a pallbearer at Nathaniel Hawthorne’s funeral in 1864. He bought the Atlantic Monthly and gave the editorship to 1865 to William Dean Howells (1837–1920), whom he had meet ten days before at a party. Editing anthologies and book series like a madman for his publishing company, he knew nearly every writer in New England — and most of them thought of him as a close and enjoyable friend. “Fun to be with” goes a long way.

A popular lecturer (predictably, for a man with a twinkle in his eye), Fields also wrote verse, especially once he retired from editing. Much of it was light and comic (predictably, again) in the mode of today’s Poem of the Day, “The Alarmed Skipper.” In easy square-built quatrains — four-foot lines in four-line stanzas — he tells the story of a Nantucket sea-captain who won’t be fooled by a skeptical sailor.

The Alarmed Skipper
by James Thomas Fields

Many a long, long year ago,   
Nantucket skippers had a plan            
Of finding out, though “lying low,”   
How near New York their schooners ran.      

They greased the lead before it fell,
And then, by sounding through the night,      
Knowing the soil that stuck, so well,  
They always guessed their reckoning right    

A skipper gray, whose eyes were dim,           
Could tell, by tasting, just the spot,
And so below he’d “dowse the glim” —        
After, of course, his “something hot.”            

Snug in his berth, at eight o’clock,     
This ancient skipper might be found; 
No matter how his craft would rock,
He slept — for skippers’ naps are sound!      

The watch on deck would now and then        
Run down and wake him, with the lead;        
He’d up, and taste, and tell the men   
How many miles they went ahead.

One night, ’twas Jotham Marden’s watch,     
A curious wag — the peddler’s son —          
And so he mused (the wanton wretch),          
“To-night I’ll have a grain of fun.      

“We’re all a set of stupid fools
To think the skipper knows by tasting            
What ground he’s on — Nantucket schools   
Don’t teach such stuff, with all their basting!”          

And so he took the well-greased lead 
And rubbed it o’er a box of earth
That stood on deck — a parsnip-bed —         
And then he sought the skipper’s berth.         

“Where are we now, sir? Please to taste.”      
The skipper yawned, put out his tongue,        
Then ope’d his eyes in wondrous haste,
And then upon the floor he sprung!    

The skipper stormed and tore his hair,           
Thrust on his boots, and roared to Marden,    
“Nantucket’s sunk, and here we are  
Right over old Marm Hackett’s garden!”

___________________________________________ 

With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.