O! woe to the delicate ship! O! woe!
For the sun is sunk, and behold!
The trooping phantoms that come and go
In the sky above and the waves below!
Ho! The wind blows wild and cold.
"The woman is weeping in weak despair;
The youth still clings to the mast,
With cheeks aflame, and with eyes that stare
At the phantoms hovering everywhere;
And the storm-rack rises fast!
"The phantoms close on the flying bark;
They flutter about her peak;
They sweep in swarms from the outer dark;
But the youth at the mast stands still and stark,
While they flap his stinging cheek.
"O! fierce was the shout of the goblins then!
How the gibber and laugh went round!
The shout and the laugh of a thousand men,
Echoed and answered, and echoed again,
Would have been a feebler sound.
"They shiver the bolts that the lightning flings;
They bellow and roar and hiss;
They splash the deck with their slimy wings—
Monstrous, horrible, ghastly things—
That climb from the foul abyss.
"Straight toward the blackness drove the ship;
But the youth still clung to the mast:
'I have read,' quoth he, with a proud, cold lip,
'That the devil gets never a man on the hip
Whom he scares not, first or last.'
"No star shines out at the woman's prayer;
O! madly distraught is she!
And the bark drives on with her wild despair
With shrieking fiends in the crowded air,
And fiends on the swarming sea.
"Nearer the blackness loomed; and the bark
Scudded before the breeze;
Nearer the blackness loomed, and hark!
The crash of breakers out of the dark,
And the shock of plunging seas!
"Then out of the water before their sight
A shape loomed bare and black!
So black that the darkness bloomed with white;
So black that the lightning grew strangely bright
And it lay in the shallop's track!
"O! woe! for the woman's wits ran daft
With the fearful bruit and burst;
She sprang to her feet, and flitting aft,
She plunged in the sea, and the black waves quaffed
The sweet life they had cursed.