The poem Kuryakin recites ("Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack, / Butting through the Channel in the mad March days, / With a cargo of Tyne coal, / Road-rails, pig-lead, / Firewood, ironware, and cheap tin trays.") ...... is from "Cargoes," by John Edward Masefield, a former Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom.