Ode' to Island Life . . .

If once you have slept on an island

you'll never be quite the same

you may look as you looked the day before

and go by the same old name . . .

You my bustle about in the street & shop.

You may sit at home and sew,

but you'll see blue water and wheeling gulls

wherever your feet may go.

you may chat with the neighbors

of this and that

and close to the fireside keep,

but you'll hear ship whistle and lighthouse bell

and waves beat through your sleep:

and you won't know why and you can't say how

such change upon you came -

but once you have slept on an island

you'll never be quite be the same . . .

-by Rachal Field

Revised: March 27, 2010 3:445pm: 

Thanks to a *Fan* of the Drummond Island Facebook page I can now add an author to today's Blog (my copy simply states "annonymous")

Rachel Field, born in New York City and educated at Radcliffe, was a well-known author of popular children's and adult books in the 1930s.  Among others, she wrote God's Pocket, in which Captain Samuel Hadlock, Jr., of Great Cranberry Island, plays a leading role.

Field summered on Sutton Island in the 1920s and 1930s, first in her mother's cottage, "Bunchberry Bungalow", and later in her own house.

She wrote the poems Cranberry Road and If Once You Have Slept on an Island about her enjoyable stays in the Cranberry Isles.

Exactly which island the poems refer to, however, is open to some controversy.  Long-time Islesford residents seem to think If Once You Have Slept on an Island was written about their island.  On the other hand, some Great Cranberry islanders claim that Rachel was staying in the Charles Spurling house there when it was written.  And, of course, Sutton Island, where she eventually owned her own home, could be the island intended.