“Starved to death, though the sea was full of
the fattest kind of fish,
—Starved, though a seaman plump and sound
had tumbled in his dish,
”—Starved though he had in his gorged insides
I’ll bet a hundredweight
Of every kind of a floating thing from codfish
down to bait.
“And this was how: He’d spied, we judged, an
empty cask afloat,