The Seven Seas

A song of little cunning; of a singer nothing worth.
Through the naked words and mean
May ye see the truth between
As the singer knew and touched it in the ends of all the Earth!

The Coastwise Lights

Our brows are wreathed with spindrift and the weed is on our knees;
Our loins are battered 'neath us by the swinging, smoking seas.
From reef and rock and skerry – over headland, ness and voe —
The Coastwise Lights of England watch the ships of England go!

Through the endless summer evenings, on the lineless, level floors;
Through the yelling Channel tempest when the syren hoots and roars —
By day the dipping house-flag and by night the rocket's trail —
As the sheep that graze behind us so we know them where they hail.

We bridge across the dark, and bid the helmsman have a care,
The flash that wheeling inland wakes his sleeping wife to prayer;
From our vexed eyries, head to gale, we bind in burning chains
The lover from the sea-rim drawn – his love in English lanes.

We greet the clippers wing-and-wing that race the Southern wool;
We warn the crawling cargo-tanks of Bremen, Leith and Hull;
To each and all our equal lamp at peril of the sea —
The white wall-sided warships or the whalers of Dundee!

Come up, come in from Eastward, from the guard-ports of the Morn!
Beat up, beat in from Southerly, O gipsies of the Horn!
Swift shuttles of an Empire's loom that weave us main to main,
The Coastwise Lights of England give you welcome back again!

Go, get you gone up-Channel with the sea-crust on your plates;
Go, get you into London with the burden of your freights!
Haste, for they talk of Empire there, and say, if any seek,
The Lights of England sent you and by silence shall ye speak.

The Song of the Dead

Hear now the Song of the Dead – in the North by the torn berg-edges —
They that look still to the Pole, asleep by their hide-stripped sledges.
Song of the Dead in the South – in the sun by their skeleton horses,
Where the warrigal whimpers and bays through the dust of the sere river-courses.

Song of the Dead in the East – in the heat-rotted jungle hollows,
Where the dog-ape barks in the kloof – in the brake of the buffalo-wallows.
Song of the Dead in the West – in the Barrens, the snow that betrayed them,
Where the wolverine tumbles their packs from the camp and the grave-mound they made them;
Hear now the Song of the Dead!

I

We were dreamers, dreaming greatly, in the man-stifled town;
We yearned beyond the skyline where the strange roads go down.
Came the Whisper, came the Vision, came the Power with the Need.
Till the Soul that is not man's soul was lent us to lead.
As the deer breaks – as the steer breaks – from the herd where they graze,
In the faith of little children we went on our ways.
Then the wood failed – then the food failed – then the last water dried —
In the faith of little children we lay down and died.
On the sand-drift – on the veldt-side – in the fern-scrub we lay,
That our sons might follow after by the bones on the way.
Follow after – follow after! We have watered the root,
And the bud has come to blossom that ripens for fruit!
Follow after – we are waiting by the trails that we lost
For the sound of many footsteps, for the tread of a host.
Follow after – follow after – for the harvest is sown:
By the bones about the wayside ye shall come to your own!

When Drake went down to the Horn
And England was crowned thereby,
'Twixt seas unsailed and shores unhailed
Our Lodge – our Lodge was born
(And England was crowned thereby).

Which never shall close again
By day nor yet by night,
While man shall take his life to stake
At risk of shoal or main
(By day nor yet by night),

But standeth even so
As now we witness here,
While men depart, of joyful heart,
Adventure for to know.
(As now bear witness here).

II

We have fed our sea for a thousand years
And she calls us, still unfed,
Though there's never a wave of all her waves
But marks our English dead:
We have strawed our best to the weed's unrest
To the shark and the sheering gull.
If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we ha' paid in full!

There's never a flood goes shoreward now
But lifts a keel we manned;