Angus Barrett (2019) has won the 2026 Sir Roger Newdigate Prize for his poem, ‘The Deposition of Harry Goodsir, Assistant Surgeon’. This award recognizes the best English verse by an Oxford undergraduate.
Angus’ poem portrays a surgeon on the HMS Erebus, one of the ships in the ill-fated 1845 expedition to chart the final section of the Northwest Passage, which resulted in both ships getting stuck in the ice and the total loss of both crews. Judges praised Barrett’s “quiet mastery” and his focus on “anatomically grounded humanity.” They admired how he balanced the metaphysical with gritty, physical details.
Angus joins the ranks of past winners like Oscar Wilde, and said: “I’m thrilled and honoured to receive this year’s prize – it’s still sinking in! Thank you to the judges for their kind comments and to my family and friends for always encouraging my writing.”
Read his poem blow:
The Deposition of Harry Goodsir, Assistant Surgeon
(HMS Erebus, September 1846)
I have stopped keeping the log.
What is there left to measure,
the leagues of ice before us,
the sky with nothing left to tell us?
Tonight, I went to the bow alone
and spoke to what lay ahead.
Not Franklin. Not Crozier.
The dark itself. The particular dark
that has no edge,
no far side where a lamp might wait.
Are you afraid? it asked
the way silence always does
by simply remaining.
I replied: I was afraid of small things once.
The disappointment of my father.
A woman in Stromness
who did not write back.
Frostbite on my lesser toes.
I worried about that last winter,
as if those toes were something
the world still needed from me.
The dark said nothing,
which is what the dark says
when it means: Is that all?
I told it about the men.
How Torrington coughed himself
to a husk before Christmas.
How Hartnell’s face looked at the end,
like a map of a place that no longer exists.
How the ones still living
move around the deck now
like words in a language you once knew.
What do you want? the dark asked.
Or maybe I asked it,
the ice having long since
crossed the gap between
the one who speaks
and the one who is spoken to.
I want the latitude of home.
I want the logical sun
that rises when it’s supposed to.
I want the smell of bread —
God, that specific smell,
yeast and heat and the ordinary
Tuesday of it.
I want to have been the kind of man
who turned back sooner.
The dark considered this.
It has all the time there is.
You came looking, it finally said.
Or maybe the wind said it. Or I did.
You came looking for the edge of me.
Did you think I had one?
I have no answer for that.
I am an assistant surgeon.
I understand the body’s geography:
where things are, what they do,
how long before they stop.
I do not understand
a darkness with no anatomy.
No organ I can name.
No wound I can describe or close.
I went back below.
The men were sleeping.
The ship creaked once,
then twice.
I wrote this down instead of nothing:
Harry Goodsir,
somewhere that is not on any chart.
― Angus Barrett