Tempest Don't Be Down

This poem turns self-doubt outward, arguing that disaster comes less from weather than from the dullness and pity of the social world.

A poem of hard-won composure that begins in proven worth - 'Everyone I knew / Had already proved / That I had nothing to prove' - and vows against vanity even after sinking. It then redefines its title term: the real 'tempest / Is not the wind that creates distruction' but 'the worlds' lethargic sight,' the way 'slightness of pity / Make[s] for uncontrolable disasters.'

The poem's quiet greatness is in relocating catastrophe from weather to attention. Destruction comes not from the storm but from a world too dull and pitying to see clearly - lethargic sight, faint pity - which lets small failures of perception swell into 'uncontrolable disasters.' The most poignant line measures the cost in family terms: 'how poor is a man / With children on his knee / When so many tales / Are behind others / He never got to see,' wealth recast as the unwitnessed lives of those who came before. The final move disarms despair on its own ground - 'dowbt is not a drawing card / When your mind began being to busy to play' - making sustained, playful absorption the cure for self-doubt. The title's address, 'Tempest Don't Be Down,' is thus the speaker steadying his own inner storm rather than pleading with the sky.