For those who will never come home to the town.
For men must work, and women must weep,
And the sooner it’s over the sooner to sleep,
And good-bye to the bar and its moaning.
Here is the same story, told in prose:—
One afternoon in a western port, three fishermen might be seen walking slowly down towards the beach. Heavy masses of clouds were moving rapidly overhead; the setting sun had tinged the sky an angry crimson, and the waves broke with a moaning noise over the bar at the mouth of the harbor. The fishermen knew that a storm was threatening, but still they were going to sea, for their families were large and their earnings had of late been small. Yet they were sad at heart, and as they sailed away they thought of the dear wives left behind, and of the dear children watching them out of the town.
The women were so anxious that they could not rest at home, so they went up to the lighthouse to trim the lamps and peer out into the darkness. The storm came on even sooner than was expected. A huge billow caught the fishermen’s boat and sank it, and the tide carried their dead bodies to the shore.
By morning the storm had passed, and the rising sun shone on the wet sand and on three poor women wringing their hands over the corpses of their husbands.
Note that in this prose rendering there is no attempt to preserve the poetry. Attention has been paid to the story only, and that has been told in the simplest manner. I here append a cluster of poems to be turned into prose.