SEA MARGE, Smith was born in Kilmarnock on the 31st December 1829 into a large family of six children. His father was an artisan, producing printing blocks that could be used in the textile industry, particularly using muslin and calico. The family moved twice during Smith’s early years, eventually settling in Glasgow. Perhaps there was little money for a formal education and the young Alexander Smith found himself working in his father’s trade at the tender age of eleven. His time spent at a small parish school at least gave him rudimentary skills in literacy and he was a particularly keen student of English poets.
SEA MARGE by Alexander Smith
SEA MARGE
The lark is singing in the blinding sky,
Hedges are white with May. The bridegroom sea
Is toying with the shore, his wedded bride,
And, in the fulness of his marriage joy,
He decorates her tawny brow with shells,
Retires a space, to see how fair she looks,
Then proud, runs up to kiss her. All is fair—
All glad, from grass to sun! Yet more I love
Than this, the shrinking day that sometimes comes
In Winter’s front, so fair ’mong its dark peers,
It seems a straggler from the files of June,
Which in its wanderings had lost its wits,
And half its beauty; and, when it return’d,
Finding its old companions gone away,
It join’d November’s troop, then marching past;
And so the frail thing comes, and greets the world
With a thin crazy smile, then bursts in tears,
And all the while it holds within its hand
A few half-wither’d flowers. I love and pity it!
