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Nahant: Poetry by the Sea

 

CHARLES HAMMOND GIBSON JR.

CHARLES HAMMOND GIBSON JR.        (1874 – 1954) summered in Nahant at East Point, overlooking the water near Forty Steps Beach.  As a horticulturalist, his rose gardens were regionally renown, and many people came to Nahant to see them the one time a year when they were open to the public.  As a preservationist, Gibson is responsible for the Gibson House Museum, opened in 1957 to keep alive the Victorian era he remembered from his youth.  Located in Boston at 137 Beacon St., and designated a National Historical Landmark by the National Park Service, the Gibson House Museum enables the public to see a four story, single family, brick and brownstone Victorian town house as it was furnished and decorated over a century ago.  As an eccentric, Charles Hammond Gibson Jr. often dressed in a formal coat, spats, and cane, long after they had fallen from fashion, and while in Boston, he left the house for dinner at the Ritz precisely at six o’clock, usually wearing a full-length fur coat.  As a poet, he wrote verse throughout his life, self-publishing three books, including The Spirit of Love and Other Poems in 1906.  “The Forty Steps,” composed at the Gibson House four months after D-Day during World War II, will remind its readers of the gun placements near Forty Steps during World War II and also of the image of Nahant as a place of peace.

 

 

 

I. Once Forty Steps; now thirty nine –    And they in doubtful state, Like ravished riches in decline,    The blasting of the great.                        II. Yet God has blessed the sacred spot,    Now touched by time and war, While echoing the cannon’s shot    Beyond the ocean’s roar.                        III. Once peopled by a stately throng,    That bathed upon the shore, Now to the poet still belong    Their annals and their lore.                        IV. O footprints of an age outworn    By fickle time and tide, Your hallowed dust lies all but gone,    Its grandeur and its pride.                         V. Today a soldier’s martial tread    Guards what is now no more, The gaiety from laughter bred,    The peace – that led to war.

 

from: typewritten manuscript archived at The Nahant Historical Society
courtesy: Gibson House