The Story of the "Orient"
"The Story of the Orient" by Helen Gray Cone is a narrative poem set on a peaceful English Sunday morning in spring, in which a weathered former sailor recounts to his young white-haired son the Battle of the Nile, fought at Aboukir Bay in 1798. The man, florid-faced and missing one arm lost later at Trafalgar, smokes at his cottage door and maps the battle line using daisies arranged on his doorstone, naming the British ships — the Vanguard, Theseus, Minotaur, Defence, and Majestic — that faced the French fleet under Admiral Brueys. He speaks with pride of Nelson, whom he served under aboard the Vanguard, describing how the Admiral was struck blind and bleeding and carried below, thought to be dying, yet returned to the deck to lead the fight once more. The climax of his story is the destruction of the Orient, Brueys' great flagship carrying a hundred and twenty guns. The ship catches fire, blazes brilliantly, and explodes with a force so tremendous that the Vanguard shakes through all her oaken timbers, as though struck by the shock of Doomsday. A strange, awful silence falls over the water, broken only by the heavy plash of falling mast and yard. The Orient goes down with her wounded helpless, her dead Admiral, and those crew members who chose to remain aboard firing defiantly to the last, their colors still flying as the ship soared into darkness. The boy listening has absorbed the story with wide, eager blue eyes, having been raised to near-worship of Nelson, but at the moment his father recounts Nelson's order to lower the boats to rescue French survivors, the child interrupts with an honest, piercing question: why, if killing the French was righteous, did Nelson order his men to save them? The father deflects the question rather than answer it, returning instead to the facts of what happened — that some of the French leaped from the burning ship while others stayed, and that the British sailors managed to rescue some sixty souls from the wreck. The poem then moves into quiet reflection. The boy knits his brows in puzzled thought over the paradox of enemies saving enemies in the midst of battle. The father sits in silent contemplation as well, unable to articulate why, in the crash of fighting, the human instinct not to let others perish overrode hatred and enmity. He cannot explain the force that woke in him and his fellow sailors, the brotherhood that snapped the bonds of war like straws. The closing stanzas draw back to the domestic scene surrounding the two as they sit in thought. A small girl toddles nearby, gathering daisies into a posy. Sunday church bells ring gently across the churchyard. A baby climbs to its mother's breast. These quiet images of innocence, tenderness, and ordinary life are placed beside the massive violence just recounted, and the final line offers the poem's quiet moral resolution: just as the child climbs slowly to its mother, so the world climbs slowly upward toward God. The act of mercy shown in lowering the boats, spontaneous and instinctive even amid carnage, is presented as one small movement in that long, slow moral ascent of humanity.
By Helen Gray Cone · First published 1929 · Genre: Historical Poetry, Narrative Poetry, War Poetry