The oxen that have sailed with the expedition from England have been slaughtered and butchered now that the supply ship is leaving. It was thought they could be loaded alive into the Erebus and the Terror, but there is no room to keep so large an animal as an ox below decks. The small ships are already crammed to the gunwales with food and coal and expedition equipment. The sailor watches the great slabs of butchered meat being loaded into a small boat to be rowed across to the Erebus. The dying animals made a terrible noise in this cold place. The red of the meat they’ve become set against the stark white of the ice looks almost beautiful. The sailor struggles for the word he wants, the word that matches his feeling at seeing the slaughtered ox being gently lowered into the skiff; the high cliff of an iceberg a white curtain behind the little scene. Tender, he thinks—the blood of the ox has sung the ice a tender red.
After the sea god has his speech, there’s a speech by a woman about how sad she is that all happiness is gone and has been replaced by sorrow. She fears that this will be a permanent condition, and the sailor supposes that perhaps, after death, this is the most that is to be feared.
At first it seems as though all the dogs are sleeping, balled into scruffy fists of fur and bone, lying in the shallow hollows they’ve clawed from the hillside. But no. The second-last dog in the line of dogs has a raven balanced on a rung of its laddery ribs. The sailor watches as the bird hunches over and hauls a rope of intestine from the hole it has made in the side of the dead dog.
Landfall has been possible in Greenland, while the sailors wait for all the supplies to be transferred over from the Barretto Junior. But the men are nervous of the Esquimaux who live in these parts, don’t do more than stumble up and down the beach, never out of sight of the ships.
The beach is crunchy with bones. The bones of dogs and seals and narwhals and birds. At first the sailor tries to avoid treading on them as he picks his way along the beach, but it is impossible not to disturb their brittle vocabulary. There are just too many of them to negotiate. The bones have unsettled the sailor. So has the carcass of the narwhal bobbing in the brine against the shingle, a blunt red badge of flesh where its unicorn tusk used to be.
The land behind the beach rises slowly into black cliffs. The rock has great claw marks scraped into its surface from the glaciers that have scoured across it. Other parts are worn smooth by the ice of each repeating year, by the frozen weight and shift of each long winter.
It seems to the sailor as though this is a landscape of grief; that rock made from ice is somehow, in spirit perhaps, still carrying the memory of the heaviness of the glaciers. And perhaps, rock made by ice is somehow still a form of ice, has the remoteness and remove of ice. The sailor knows that to say this landscape is one of grief is to impose his own grief upon it. But landscape also calls forth emotion, and the sailor feels the sad power of this place. Perhaps it’s because it is an unbroken landform and that is somehow more moving—the undulations of the rock, everything exposed. Or perhaps it’s the idea that there has not been a single obvious change to this landscape in centuries, and the years of accumulated sadness, of spent emotion, have become as visible as the rocks themselves.
The final speech in the second part of the poem is by a Titan who says that Hyperion hasn’t been defeated and in that there is still hope. And then Hyperion himself appears. Even in sorrow he can’t hide his light and the Titan cave glows with his arrival. Even the Titans who want to wallow in their suffering seem glad to see him drop down from the cliffs above, calling his brother’s name.
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