"Perhaps it was the result of a lifetime spent working as a Customs
officer, but Edward Edwin Foot’s poetry left nothing to chance or
personal interpretation.
No sooner had he created an elusive poetic effect than he introduced a
footnote to explain it. For example in ‘Disaster at Sea’ he writes one
to the very first line.
The captain scans the ruffled zone1
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1. A figurative expression, intended by the Author to signify the horizon.
His greatest achievement was to write footnotes to the first two lines
of his elegy on the death of Palmerston which were longer than the
entire poem. These are the first two lines.
Altho’ we1 mourn for one now gone,
And he — that grey-hair’d Palmerston2
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1. The nation.
2. The Right Honourable Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston,
K.G., G.C.B., (the then Premier of the British Government) died at
Brocket Hall, Herts. at a quarter to eleven o'clock in the forenoon
of Wednesday, 18 October 1865 aged 81 years (all but two days),
having been born on 20 October 1784. The above lines were written on
the occasion of his death."