Borne pains without number.
Waken, Oh, waken us not.
It is impossible to give the drowsy sound of the melody in a language, like English, that has been forged in unflagging struggle, in the stress of battle with the forces of nature. Generations of ailooled nerves and lips had saturated every word with languorous music. No cradle-song that I had ever heard approached it in soporific power. All who sat within sound of it dropped their eyelids; the voices began to seem distant and stifled. At times the music died away, and again it rose in dim yet growing echo, at first like the murmur of bees in the still summer air, then like a wail swept fitfully by a breath that comes we know not whence and vanishes in a moment; out of unknown depths the lullaby threw its charm and then slowly withdrew it; the scarce-felt gradation of the cadence was as strong in its hypnotic fascination as the breeze-flung note. The singers seemed to fall into a dream as they sang. The words melted into one liquid rill of song. Faint and muffled its melody floated up as out of a dream. The falla lagged and dallied upon the gleaming levels of the sea; it was the barge of sleep, and we seemed to have been a thousand years fettered in trance. The sound of the paddles came only at intervals, and then it ceased, and the whole skyey vault and the weary sea and the specks of being that traversed it vanished. I fell countless fathoms through space. And then the existence snapped short; a crash rounded me up into the confines of life again. It was the fusillade of the boatswain’s whip. And before we were rightly awake the ship was swinging along to this loud chant sung at full lung-pitch by the paddlers:
We beat with our paddles the passionless sea;
The flush of our wounding dies out on her face;
We dance free as gods on her billowy lea;
The trail of our feet no mortal can trace.
The life in our veins
Outgallops all pains.
Allanamoulin, Allanamoulin.