On old Cape Cod

"On old Cape Cod" by Ferdinand C. Lane is a collection of poetry written in the mid-20th century. It offers a lyrical portrait of Cape Cod’s shores, dunes, marshes, and maritime life, blending natural observation with local history and myth. The poems move between celebratory and elegiac tones as they honor coastal beauty, seafaring courage, and the tug of memory over a vanishing way of life. The opening of the work unfolds as a series of vivid vignettes: haunted shoals at Monomoy, the music of a seashell, seasonal winds, enchanted marshes, and the scents and flora of the Cape. It sketches landmarks and hazards—Nauset’s whistling buoy, Peaked Hill Bars, Race Point storms—alongside wildlife and plants, from sandpipers and wild geese to beach plums and goldenrod. Maritime lore permeates the scenes: old captains by the fire, flotsam meditations, an ancient logbook, an abandoned hulk, and tributes to Coast Guardsmen and a steadfast lighthouse keeper. Human portraits deepen the mood—a widow’s nightly vigil, a wharfside dreamer, and Easter rites on Chatham Bars—while reflective pieces weigh time’s passage, fog and midnight, the shaping tides, and lost places like Billingsgate and Hog’s Back Church. Together, these early poems establish a nostalgic, sea-battered, and myth-tinged meditation on nature, community, and mortality along the Cape.