‘New Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens’. From a Cornish Widow. (New York: E.F. Dutton and Company, 1906), pp. 62-70. GoogleBooks

Reginald L. Cook, ‘Frost on Frost: The Making of Poems’. American Literature, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Duke University Press: 1956), pp. 62-72. JSTOR
Lesley Lee Francis. Robert Frost: An Adventure In Poetry, 1900-1918. (Transaction Publishers, 2004), pp. 84-98.

1960 (posthumous) ‘Complaint of the Dying Peasantry’

In ‘Complaint’ Muir despairs the loss of the ‘old songs’, valorizing oral culture over a paper one. He sees ‘Sir Patrick Spens shut in a book’ and contemporary writers as ‘newspapermen’. Muir writes:

Sir Patrick Spens put out to sea
In all the country cottages
With music and ceremony
For five centuries.

Till Scott and Hogg, the robbers, came
And nailed the singing tragedies down
In dumb letters under a name
And led the bothy to the town.

Muir equates Skipper Spens with the independence and honour of the traveling bard, a man of the people, the ‘peasantry’, who was oppressed and ‘put out to sea’ to die—thus paralleling the plot of the original ballad.

[Excerpts from: ‘Complaint of the Dying Peasantry’, Collected Poems. (London: Faber and Faber, 1963 [1960]). p. 1.Elizabeth Huberman, The Poetry of Edwin Muir: the Field of Good and Ill. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). p. 75.]

1948 ‘The North Sea’

In ‘The North Sea’ he mentions Spens four times by name, including in the opening lines and in the concluding stanza. Though not in ballad form, the poem plays on the sound and rhythm of ‘Spens’.

For example, in Sir Walter Scott’s version of the ballad, the king’s letter says:

‘To Noroway, to Noroway,
To Noroway o’er the faem;’

MacNeice writes:

Doorway? No more so than your office hours.
Doorway? No more so than your hours in bed
Alone or with a companion.

‘The North Sea’ is set on a steamer crossing that body of water. The narrator questions notions of time, musing about Spens and the Vikings and the careless immortality of this sea. MacNeice writes of Spens as ‘a man of iron/And master of his craft’ who, like everyone else, must ‘conform to the sea’s routine’. ‘The North Sea’ begins with a clear allusion to ‘Spens’: ‘But not for a king’s daughter?’

1953 Canto XVIII of ‘Autumn Sequel’

In ‘Autumn Sequel’ MacNeice parallels the death of Spens with that of King Arthur in his barge.

1995 ‘Excalibur’

Clark is an American poet, editor, and biographer who studied in England and lived in Europe for over a decade. Clark begins ‘Excalibur’:

While the new moon winter bright swimming
Up overhead holds the old moon cradled

He then paints the colors and movement of an evening sky, a scene very similar to that in ‘Dejection’. Clark uses some of the same words and phrases, yet twists the ‘Spens’ image of the old moon by turning the waning sliver into a baby’s ‘coy smile’ with ‘darkening hints of menace in its eyes’. To begin the poem’s second half, Clark repeats Coleridge’s lines and extends them into his:

Well!
If the bard was weatherwise who made
That grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spens
A meteorological talisman,
We’ll wake up to a storm before morning.

Clark, in the same way as Coleridge, Shelley, and Longfellow, uses the description of the moon in ‘Spens’ as a memorable image, but also as a way to explore omen and supernatural belief. In ‘Excalibur’ Clark uses this new moon before a storm as a parallel to a moment of suspense. The moon is like the moment before King Arthur pulls the sword out of the stone. Unlike the original ‘Spens’, Clark’s ‘Excalibur’ ends with the realization that the storm is never as significant as it is built up to be. Clark’s new moon seems to reflect a more modern, cynical sensibility.

[Excerpt from ‘Excalibur.’ Like Real People. (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1995), p. 153.]

2000 ‘What Does It Matter Now’

Fuller, an American poet based in Chicago, earned a PhD in English Literature early in his career. In 2000 he published ‘What Does It Matter Now’, emphasizing the tragedy of Spens’s commitment to duty. ‘What Does It Matter Now’ begins with the line ‘Standing around on principle’ and suggests that though Spens was ‘given only to inner sense’ and ‘a few facts have died or were revoked’, his life ends futilely—as does the poem:

tossed on the sand
he plays with his bones
the lessor finds him there

By titling the poem ‘What Does It Matter Now’ and describing the terrestrial scenery that Spens perhaps imagines as his death becomes inevitable, Fuller asks the reader to wonder if all of Spens’s high morality was really worth it—or if any endeavour is in the end. The lessor, the property owner, is still alive and in power. Yet Fuller ends with a thoughtful homophone here, as this may be read as ‘lesser’, just as the lords in ‘Spens’ are shown as lesser people, dead at the skipper’s feet.

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. ]