National Poetry Day - Ballad In Blank Verse

To celebrate National Poetry Day, we are publishing poems across all our blogs.

John Davidson was a poet who spent much of his life in Greenock, working as a teacher at the Highlanders Academy, a school which he himself attended. 

This poem has recently been quoted and reprinted on the panels surrounding the statue of Ginger The Horse in Dalrymple Street. 

Davidson, and later WS Graham evoke a proud, working Greenock, when the Sugar Sheds and shipyards were not simply part of daily life, but an intergal part of the landscape...

from A Ballad in Blank Verse

All summer and all Autumn: this grey town

That pipes the morning up before the lark

With shrieking steam, and from a hundred stalks

Lacquers the sooty sky: where hammers clang

On Iron hulls, and cranes and harbours creak

Rattle and wing, whole cargoes on their necks;

Where men sweat gold that others hoard or spend,

This old grey town, this firth, the further strand

Spangled with hamlets, and wooded steeps,

Whose rocky tops behind each other press,

Fantastically carved like antique helms

High flung in heaven’s cloudy armoury,

Is world enough for me.