White Horses at Weymouth

Dramatic scene - splendid white horses rushing in towards Weymouth beach yesterday evening - but potentially dangerous for kite-surfers.

It made me think of Elgar's Sea Pictures op. 37 - and Adam Lindsay Gordon's poem The Swimmer


Sally-Anne Russell, mezzo-soprano, Andrea Katz, piano

From The Swimmer - A Poem by Adam Lindsay Gordon

With short, sharp violent lights made vivid,
To the southward far as the sight can roam,
Only the swirl of the surges livid,
The seas that climb and the surfs that comb,
Only the crag and the cliff to nor'ward,
And rocks receding, and reefs flung forward,
And waifs wreck'd seaward and wasted shoreward
On shallows sheeted with flaming foam.

A grim grey coast and a seaboard ghastly,
And shores trod seldom by feet of men --
Where the batter'd hull and the broken mast lie
They have lain embedded these long years ten.
Love! when we wander'd here together,
Hand in hand through the sparkling weather,
From the heights and hollows of fern and heather,
God surely loved us a little then....

Oh, brave white horses! you gather and gallop,
The storm sprite loosens the gusty reins;
Now the stoutest ship were the frailest shallop
In your hollow backs, or your high arch'd manes.
I would ride as never a man has ridden
In your sleepy swirling surges hidden,
To gulfs foreshadow'd, through straits forbidden,
Where no light wearies and no love wanes.


Foam Horses

Alternate reference

Coastguard called to search for missing kitesurfer in Weymouth Bay, Dorset Echo


Another White Horse: