We know Captain John Smith (1579–1631) as one of a generation of speculators and risk-takers: the soldiers-at-large, the privateers, the explorers, the planters of colonies in the late Tudor and early Stuart eras. Smith was, after all, a contemporary of the adventurer and poet Sir Walter Raleigh (1552–1618).

Actually, we’re probably inclined to think of Raleigh first as a poet, audacious enough to write a riposte to Christopher Marlowe’s “Passionate Shepherd” (which appeared as the Sun’s Poem of the Day this summer). We also remember Raleigh as the sparkling courtier who charmed the aging Elizabeth I and persuaded her to read Edmund Spenser’s flattering epic, “The Faerie Queene.”

We remember him as the founder of the lost colony of Roanoke, and the indefatigable seeker of the fabled golden city, “El Dorado,” subject of the poem by Edgar Allan Poe (which also appeared as Poem of the Day this summer). And we remember Raleigh, beheaded after a detachment of his men attacked a Spanish outpost on the Orinoco River in Venezuela, as a casualty of the Jacobite court’s uneasy truce with Spain. 

The commoner John Smith matched Raleigh in audacity and grit, if nothing else. We know him, or think we do — thanks to his own account of his capture by the Powhatan tribe and his subsequent rescue by the chief’s daughter, Pocahontas — as the heroic figure loved by the young indigenous princess. Or we think we know him as a historical charlatan, star of an incident for which, conveniently, there were no other English-literate eyewitnesses.

But we know him also as a founding member of the colony at Jamestown. Beside Raleigh’s, Smith’s exploits look relatively prosaic. Where Raleigh’s colony disappeared romantically in a cloud of mystery, Smith’s colonists largely died of their own incompetence. That Smith tried and failed to make them do the necessary work of survival seems consistent with the least disputable parts of his legend.

Where Raleigh became a political martyr, Smith capped his more or less futile adventures in Virginia by blowing himself up, though not fatally, with gunpowder in a canoe. He later participated in exploration of New England, mapping its landscape and analyzing the success of French colonial efforts, in contrast to the failure of English colonies. We might understand this endeavor — contra his earlier Pocahontas account — as a mapping of his personal failure in a high-stakes game. 

We think of Raleigh primarily as a poet. Smith, not so much. But today’s Poem of the Day, in rhymed common-meter octets which conclude on paired tetrameter lines, brings to light this submerged facet of Smith’s capacity for introspection. The poem’s speaker is a ship whose wreckage marks one of the treacherous shoals along the southern Atlantic coast. But the speaker might well be the man himself, emerging as a human sea-mark to signal the ways that a life spent in risk-taking might founder and fall to pieces. 

The Sea-Marke
by John Smith

Aloofe, aloofe, and come no neare,
  the dangers doe appeare;
Which if my ruine had not beene
  you had not seene:
I onely lie upon this shelfe
  to be a mark to all
  which on the same might fall,
That none may perish but my selfe.
 
If in or outward you be bound,
  doe not forget to sound;
Neglect of that was cause of this
  to steare amisse.
The Seas were calme, the wind was faire,
  that made me so secure,
  that now I must indure
All weathers be they foule or faire.
 
The Winters cold, the Summers heat,
  alternatively beat
Upon my bruised sides, that rue
  because too true
That no releefe can ever come.
  But why should I despair
  Being promised so faire
That there shall be a day of Dome.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.