James Elroy Flecker begins his poem, "The Old Ships", in the buttonholing style of the Ancient Mariner: "I have seen old ships … " During his consular travels in Greece and the Middle East, Flecker certainly would have seen, and probably sailed on, old ships. But he is no more interested than Coleridge in evoking an ordinary ship's smells and sounds and character. The poem's very realism is dream-like. Its intensely dark and bright colours are those of the Mediterranean, enriched by a classics-steeped, proto-Imagist imagination. Imagination is the country from which Flecker is reporting.

The pace is "drowsy" from the outset, with those alliterative S-sounds slowing the first line. There is a leisurely quality in the rhymes – often set wide apart (sun/gun/run/green//seen). I wonder if it occurred to him as he worked on the poem that, if his muse insisted on having "oranges" as the end-word in line eight, he might face a small technical problem? I imagine him in a state of entrancement as the assonantal possibility of "Genoese" dawned on him. Critics of the day probably tut-tutted, but he gets away with it.

The effrontery is compounded by the fact that this line and the next one are foreshortened: three stresses replace the established five. As in the second stanza, the shorter lines slip naturally into the rhythm's gentle sea-like roll. The horror of that scene, in which corpses are tumbled like fruit, makes itself felt; yet, at the same time, it seems muted, controlled by artful composition. The realism is professional photo-realism. But certainly, momentarily, it seem as if the creator of this poem (published in 1915) could have been thinking about a more recent "hell-raking" – that of the first world war. He himself was exempt from combat because of tuberculosis – which was soon to kill him.

The second stanza washes us farther back, and deeper into the imagination. The focus is now a single "drowsy ship". Almost excitedly ("who knows – who knows") the poet reverses time. This older ship is imagined as a wreck, "fished up beyond Aeaea". Aeaea was Circe's island, and the wonder that transfixes the speaker is that the ship might have belonged to Odysseus. It's as if Flecker himself is patching up and repainting the vessel. The "talkative bald-headed seaman" who tells "great lies about his wooden horse" is far from dream-like. This is another moment where fantasy and realism meet.

Finally, the ship returns to its most distant origins. In a visionary metamorphosis, the wood flowers. We continue to be held in the trance of myth, and the imagination that aestheticises it, and feel as reluctant as the poet must have been to emerge from the gorgeous spell.

The Old Ships

I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep

Beyond the village which men still call Tyre,

With leaden age o'ercargoed, dipping deep

For Famagusta and the hidden sun

That rings black Cyprus with a lake of fire;

And all those ships were certainly so old -

Who knows how oft with squat and noisy gun,

Questing brown slaves or Syrian oranges,

The pirate Genoese

Hell-raked them till they rolled

Blood, water, fruit and corpses up the hold.

But now through friendly seas they softly run,

Painted the mid-sea blue or shore-sea green,

Still patterned with the vine and grapes in gold.

But I have seen,

Pointing her shapely shadows from the dawn,

An image tumbled on a rose-swept bay,

A drowsy ship of some yet older day;

And, wonder's breath indrawn,

Thought I - who knows - who knows - but in that same

(Fished up beyond Aeaea, patched up new

- Stern painted brighter blue -)

That talkative, bald-headed seaman came

(Twelve patient comrades sweating at the oar)

From Troy's doom-crimson shore,

And with great lies about his wooden horse

Set the crew laughing, and forgot his course.

It was so old a ship - who knows, who knows?

- And yet so beautiful, I watched in vain

To see the mast burst open with a rose,

And the whole deck put on its leaves again.