Sailing Ships

Lying on Downs above the wrinkling bayI with the kestrels shared the cleanly day,

The candid day; wind-shaven, brindled turf;

Tall cliffs; and long sea-line of marbled

From Cornish Lizard to the Kentish

Lipping the bulwarks of the English shore,

While many a lovely ship below sailed

On unknown errand, kempt and leisurely;

And after each, oh, after each, my

Fled forth, as, watching from the Downs apart,

I shared with ships good joys and fortunes

That might befall their beauty and their pride;

Shared first with them the blessed void

Of oily days at sea, when only

The porpoise's slow wheel to break the

Of satin water indolently green,

When for'ard the crew, caps tilted over eyes,

Lay heaped on deck; slept; mumbled; smoked; threw dice;

The sleepy summer days; the summer nights(The coast pricked out with rings of harbour-lights),

The motionless nights, the vaulted nights of

When high in the cordage drifts the entangled moon,

And blocks go knocking, and the sheets go slapping,

And lazy swells against the sides come lapping;

And summer mornings off red Devon rocks,

Faint inland bells at dawn and crowing cocks;

Shared swifter days, when headlands into

Trod grandly; threatened; and were lost again,

Old fangs along the battlemented coast;

And followed still my ship, when winds were

Night-purified, and, lying steeply over,

She fled the wind as flees a girl her lover,

Quickened by that pursuit for which she fretted,

Her temper by the contest proved and whetted.

Wild stars swept overhead; her lofty

Reared to a ragged heaven sown with

As leaping out from narrow English

She faced the roll of long Atlantic seas.

Her captain then was I,

I was her crew,

The mind that laid her course, the wake she drew,

The waves that rose against her bows, the gales,--Nay,

I was more:

I was her very

Rounded before the wind, her eager keel,

Her straining mast-heads, her responsive wheel,

Her pennon stiffened like a swallow's wing;

Yes,

I was all her slope and speed and swing,

Whether by yellow lemons and blue

She dawdled through the isles off Thessaly,

Or saw the palms like sheaves of

On desert's verge below the sunset bars,

Or passed the girdle of the planet

The Southern Cross looks over to the Bear,

And strayed, cool Northerner beneath strange skies,

Flouting the lure of tropic estuaries,

Down that long coast, and saw Magellan's Clouds arise.

And some that beat up Channel homeward-boundI watched, and wondered what they might have found,

What alien ports enriched their teeming

With crates of fruit or bars of unwrought gold?

And thought how London clerks with

Had filed the bills of lading of those ships,

Clerks that had never seen the embattled sea,

But wrote down jettison and barratry,

Perils,

Adventures, and the Act of God,

Having no vision of such wrath flung broad;

Wrote down with weary and accustomed

The classic dangers of sea-faring men;

And wrote 'Restraint of Princes,' and 'the

Of the King's Enemies,' as vacant facts,

Blind to the ambushed seas, the encircling

Of angry nations foaming into war.