Open Sea

A sitting day at our office. After dinner to Whitehall; to the Privy Seal, whither my father came to me, and staid talking with me a great while, telling me that he had propounded Mr. John Pickering for Sir Thomas Honywood’s daughter, which I think he do not deserve for his own merit: I know not what he may do for his estate.
My father and Creed and I to the old Rhenish Winehouse, and talked and drank till night. Then my father home, and I to my Lord’s; where he told me that he would suddenly go into the country, and so did commend the business of his sea commission to me in his absence. After that home by coach, and took my 100l. that I had formerly left at Mr. Rawlinson’s, home with me, which is the first that ever I was master of at once. To prayers, and to bed.

A sitting day
at the sea,
that sudden country.

The business
of sea is absence,
home to prayers.


Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Monday 13 August 1660.

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