THE DERELICT.
Make way! Make way! to the larboard! port!
The chop and the swell are mine!
And I am the ghost of the brawling tide,
The lord of the whelming brine!
And I am the wraith of the inky rain,
Made mad by the swash and swirl,
That pillaged the souls of a hundred men,
Who sunk in a dizzy whirl.
Dip, dip your flag and your milk-white rag,
And lavish your dole and fee,
But turn your prow! Make room! Make room!
For there’s never a truce for me!
I challenge the bar and the stout sea-wall;
I silence the brazen bell;
I muffle the song of the galley-slave
In a maze and a dream of hell.
For mine is the blood of the blackest night,
Made red by the comet’s flare;
And I am in league with the rampant blade
That leaps from the thunder’s lair.
I masque in the targe of the afterglow,
When the fisherman tacks for home;
I crouch in the track where the green-bills whirl,
And hide in the gullied foam.
O, the long-wide waves, with their snowy bloom,
When the winds are at rest, are mine;
And the organ-shrill of the equinox,
Which musters the hordes in line,
Comes echoing back from the low frontier,
And crags where the breakers boom,
Like the crooning notes of a lorelei,
For I am the sleuth of Doom.
And ever the cry of the wander-lure,
Alert with a lifting wing,
Is urging me on through the sludge and spume,
With a sugg and a heave and swing.
And I am alive! though the dead be dead,
And huddled in crowds below,
With their faces paled in a murky sleep;
Make way! Make way! Yo ho!
For I am in search of the glut and sack,
The plunder of ship and crew,
And I am the skipper of wrack and raid,
And my hundred souls are true!
And I am the stumbling-block of life,
The lord of the whelming brine,
I flank the gates of the curving world,
And its great sea-paths are mine.