2006 ‘Sir Patrick Spens’

Hershaw retells the ballad from Spens’s point of view, instead of through an omniscient narrator. Dunfermline and Aberdour, both mentioned in Percy’s version of the ballad, are in Fife, where Hershaw is a native. Hershaw sets his sonnet in the middle of the storm with the ship about to founder. Spens is frustrated, but resigned to his fate. He does not blame his death and the loss of his ship on the ‘gurly sea’ or the moon. He blames it instead on the spiteful landsman who had recommended him to the king. Hershaw’s Spens not only does not respect the king and his court, he hates the nobles aboard:

some fool at Court I’d crossed, officious, smug
condemned the pricks below in cork heeled shoon
and sunk me with a word in the King’s lug.

Hershaw ends with Spens declaring:’A bitter drink then—saltier than French wine/we’ll drink the King’s good health among the brine’. Hershaw uses the original ballad in his own poem to reiterate the theme of the original work: ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ is the story of a competent mariner who suffers from the power of foolish and callous men ashore.

[Excerpts from: ‘Sir Patrick Spens,’ Fifty Fife Sonnets Coarse and Fine: Parochial Petrarchan Poems for Pleasure and Perusal. (Kirkcaldy, Scotland: Akros Publications, 2006), p. 7. ]