A Sonnet For Sir Ernest Shackleton - Hugh de Lautour

A Sonnet For Sir Ernest

Rest, Sir Ernest, rest beneath your star;
All striving done and “life’s set prize” attained:
Not geographic goals, but greater far
The pinnacles of leadership you gained.
Rest, Sir Ernest, rest. God knows there’s none
Deserves it more: the long Antarctic night
Now friend, not foe, with South’s white warfare won
And crew from death’s dark door led back to light.
How was it your endurance overcame
The daily struggle just to keep alive
Long past the point where death would bring no shame?
Half starved and frozen, how did you survive,
And how was no man lost while in your care?
God knows. God knows it well. For He was there.

NOTES
Line 1 – There is a 9-pointed star on Sir Ernest’s gravestone. 9 was his lucky number.
Line 2 – There is an inscription on the back of his gravestone: “I hold that man should
strive to his uttermost for his life’s set prize.”. This is taken from a poem called “The Statue and the Bust” by Robert Browning, Sir Ernest’s favourite poet.
(The lines are actually “Let a man contend to the uttermost / For his life’s set prize, be it what it will.”)
Line 3 – referring to the fact that he never actually reached the South Pole or crossed the
Continent
Line 7 – Sir Ernest often referred to “the white warfare of the South.” – the (blood red) First World War was raging all the time he was away on the Endurance expedition.
Line 9 – Sir Ernest’s family motto was “Fortitudine Vincimus” – “By Endurance we
Conquer”
Line 10 – “a daily struggle to keep ourselves alive” is a phrase Sir Ernest uses in his book “South” (p. 183)
Last line – a reference to the “fourth person” that both Shackleton and Worsley thought they saw with them on their crossing of South Georgia.

by Hugh de Lautour
shared by the author