A sinking ship, a stranded crew, and the first thing the poem cares about is a banjo. Dave Bonta begins with Shackleton's ship lost in the ice, but the second line already tilts our attention: the ship "went down without its banjo." The instrument gets the sense of rescue, and the vessel is just something that goes under. Shackleton's own phrase, "vital mental medicine," is the poem's key idea. Survival here means keeping the mind alive as well as the body, and a cheap, cheerful instrument turns out to be as essential as food or shelter.
The title, "Medicine Show (5)," adds a layer. The number suggests this belongs to a series, though the poem itself tells us nothing more about that. A medicine show brings to mind travelling entertainers selling dubious cures, a world of patter and performance. Bonta borrows the phrase and quietly removes the fraud. In his poem the entertainment really is the cure, and the "show" is twenty-two men singing in a hut.
The form helps this feel like storytelling rather than a lecture. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, only a single block of twenty-eight lines running on from one to the next. The enjambment is often playful. "Fished out / at the last minute & hauled along" has the lurch of something grabbed in a hurry, and the sentence pauses to introduce "one Leonard Hussey, meteorologist / & cut-up" as if the speaker were chatting. The ampersands do similar work. They look hurried and informal, and they suit the word "raffish," which describes both the crew and the poem's tone. Even the details of Hussey's job, "quick wit" and a "repertoire of banjo tunes," make the point that morale was part of the expedition's equipment.
The middle of the poem turns into a series of commands: "Picture them singing Stephen Foster," "Picture webbed feet / frying in a pan," later "Imagine that banjo." The speaker acts like a showman, steering our imagination. The scenes he asks for are deliberately mixed. "Slabs of seal meat" is blunt and heavy on the tongue. Then comes a sudden lift into something dreamlike: the one remaining boat is their roof, and "the southern stars" are "swimming / over its hull." The verb makes the sky liquid, as though the overturned boat had become a ship again, sailing under the stars. The comic moment of New Year's Day, with men who "hopped & shuffled / their cornball best," is affectionate rather than mocking. "Cornball" admits the music is corny, and the poem's point is that corniness is exactly what keeps despair away.
Then the tone changes. "And years later" jumps us forward, and the wording grows quieter: "on the night he died he asked / for one last tune." The request is small and human. After so much lively imagery, the last picture is pale and still: the banjo "pale as a bloodless cheek, / the explorer's watery gaze." The grammar is slightly loose here, and the comparison seems to blur the instrument and the dying man into one image. Judging by the imagery, the banjo's pale round body takes on the look of a face. "Watery" also carries a faint echo of the ice and sea that have run through the poem.
The ending avoids both a grand statement and a moment of silence for its own sake. "And in the silence that followed, / shadows from the oil lamp / continuing to dance." The last line has no full stop of its own and trails off into the participle "continuing." It also answers the earlier "hopped & shuffled." The men's dancing was a human effort against the cold. Now the dancing is only shadow, but it goes on after the music and the man have stopped.
The poem is significant because it takes a famous story of endurance and finds its meaning in an unheroic object. Courage in this telling is also songs, jokes and a ridiculous hot meal of seal and fried feet. Bonta lets that idea settle quietly in a closing image of flickering light.