James Elroy Flecker: the "Golden Journey" poet

Attending a lunch-party just after Christmas, I fell into conversation with two architects reminiscing about a trip they had made many years before to Samarkand. They assured me that, while the bulk of the city was the usual Soviet eyesore, the ancient centre was breathtaking.

This reminded me of one of my favourite 20th Century poems, “The Golden Journey To Samarkand” by James Elroy Flecker, written in 1913. Within two years, the poet was dead of consumption, at the age of 30. 

I’m pretty sure my first encounter with this magical work was as an undergraduate, in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, where I found Flecker’s handwritten copy in a cloth-shrouded cabinet containing a variety of manuscripts.  

“The Golden Journey To Samarkand” was the one that caught my eye. The first four stanzas of the Prologue had me hooked:

We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die, We Poets of the proud old lineage Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why, -

What shall we tell you? Tales, marvellous tales Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest, Where nevermore the rose of sunset pales, And winds and shadows fall towards the West: 

And there the world's first huge white-bearded kings In dim glades sleeping, murmur in their sleep, And closer round their breasts the ivy clings, Cutting its pathway slow and red and deep.

And how beguile you? Death has no repose Warmer and deeper than the Orient sand  Which hides the beauty and bright faith of those Who make the Golden Journey to Samarkand

It goes on for several more pages, but you get the gist. 

The poem is crammed with beautiful images and exquisite lyricism: “…the world’s first huge white-bearded kings/In dim glades sleeping…”, “death has no repose/Warmer and deeper than the Orient sand…”. Lines like those aren’t merely memorable: they’re unforgettable.

Later, in The Epilogue (the poem is consists of two distinct halves), as the members of the caravan gather in Bagdad for their journey, they describe the goods they’re carrying in such a way that we can see, feel and taste them: “Indian carpets dark as wine”, “We have rose-candy, we have spikenard/Mastic and terebinth…”, “…manuscripts in peacock styles/By Ali of Damascus…” , “…swords/Engraved with storks and apes and crocodiles…”. I’m particularly fond of “…such sweet jams meticulously jarred/As God’s own Prophet eats in Paradise.”

But the poem is not just an exercise in swooning exoticism: it’s about mankind’s restless, questing nature, our need to find answers. The Pilgrims tell us: “...we shall go always/A little further...” in search of “...a prophet who can understand/Why men were born”. And when the women complain about the men deserting them the Watchman replies, wryly, “…it was ever thus./Men are unwise and curiously planned.” 

Aren’t we just.

And the women respond, as they have – with some justification - down the ages: “They have their dreams, and do not think of us.” 

Throughout the poem, with minor variations, the travelers chant the line: “We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand” – though I prefer the more metrically regular: “We take the Golden Road to Samarkand, which suggests the tramp of weary but determined feet. The cumulative effect, though, is brilliant, implying, as it does, that an inner compulsion means that those undertaking the journey really have no choice in the matter. 

Flecker, was married, spoke eight languages (ancient and modern), attended both Oxford and Cambridge, and began his diplomatic career as Vice Consul in Constantinople, where he was first diagnosed with TB. Apart from a brief sojourn in Lebanon, he spent much of the rest of his life in sanatoria in Europe: “The Golden Journey” was written while convalescing in Switzerland. 

Despite all that, he became one of the leading poets of the Georgian Movement, whose members re-embraced Romanticism in the years before the First World War. But while others from that period – Rupert Brooke, A.E. Houseman, Yeats and Wilfred Owen  - are deservedly remembered, Flecker, undeservedly, isn’t. 

If “The Golden Journey” had been his only great poem, his current obscurity might be understandable, but as any collection of his verse will demonstrate, Flecker produced a number of masterpieces, including “To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence”, “Gravis Dulcis Immutabilis”,  “War Song of the Saracens” (“We are they who come faster than fate; we are they who ride early or late;/We storm at your ivory gate: Pale Kings of the Sunset, beware!”),  and “The Old Ships” (“I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep/Beyond the village which men still call Tyre”). 

There are several fine collections of Flecker’s work, but my favourite is “Selected Poems of James Elroy Flecker” published in 1999 by Robson Books, which features an excellent introduction by Jean Cantlie Stewart.