A Sailor's Life
Oh,
a sailor hasn't much to brag —
An
oilskin suit and a dunnage bag.
But,
howsoever humble he be,
By
the Living God, he has the sea!
The
long, white leagues and the foam of it,
And
the heart to make a home of it,
On
a ship that kicks up waves behind
Through
the blazing days and tempests blind.
Oh,
a sailor hasn't much to love —
But
he has the huge, blue sky above
The
everlasting waves around,
That
wash with an eternal sound.
So
bury me, when I come to die,
Where
the full-sailed, heeling clippers ply;
Give
up the last cold body of me,
To
the only home that I have — the sea!
Move ahead to 1910, when Upton
Sinclair and his wife Meta, said to be a woman who dripped of sensuality, built a house in the single-tax village of
Arden, Delaware. A year later, Sinclair invited Kemp to camp on the couple's
land. (A bedding fit for a “hobo’s poet) Sadly, Meta swooned for Kemp and left her husband for
the poet, all leading to a nasty divorce. (Prior to Kemp, Meta had an affair with John Armistead Collier, a
theology student from Memphis; they had a son together named Ben.)
But Meta, a noted neurotic, wasn’t
the Hobo type. She was descended from one of the First Families of Virginia,
and had high ambitions for herself and dropped Kemp as quickly as she had picked
him up.
Sinclair
blossomed with his next wife Mary Craig Kimbrough, another woman from the
American elite who had written articles and a book on Winnie Davis, the
daughter of Confederate States of America President Jefferson Davis.
Kemp (and Meta) faded into oblivion.
He became a regular denizen of Greenwich Village in New York City and
Provincetown on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, where he was associated with the
Provincetown Players. (There is a street named for him, Harry Kemp Way, in
Provincetown.) He died on Cape Cod in 1960.