Reading this section of Melinda Mueller’s What the ice gets: Shackleton’s Antarctic Expedition 1914-1916 (A poem), (200; 11), reminds me of the response of someone I met recently to Shackleton’s South. Both suggest that what Shackleton achieved was to have been himself.
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– and that’s what I learned what I can do: I can
turn back. There lay the White road to the Pole, a mere
hundred miles let to get the glory. But the road to glory led on
to our deaths. I chose not to take it. Now Scott’s laid down
all that route, and won the country’s adulation. What can
adulation mean to Scott now he’s dead – or to those men
he took to death beside him? When Emily asked me
how I turned around, I said better a live donkey
than a lion dead. I discovered I wouldn’t kill myself
or other men for my ambition. The Prize was not
a prize unless we lived to claim it. What then
did I win, that time? Least of all the Furthest South,
an ephemera: Furthest South – So Far. More, my life
and further chances. We fall to rise, are baffled to fight
better. The best of what I won out of that journey was
Frank Wild, that steady little man – sure of me since then.
Now my longing to do something singular drives me South
again. It seems I am just good as an explorer and nothing
else, meant to live life in the blue solitudes. The territory
I most wish to claim is in men’s minds – how clear to me
they are, the minds of others, myself a country that thwarts me when I would
go forward. but to be seen in others’ eyes – not
to leave for monument my body frozen in the snow,
as Scott did, but still somehow to win through to a place
of honour in the hearts of valiant men, that is my Pole.
As to me own heart – I mean this damned knot
of muscle in my chest – I fear it…