All through the windless night the clipper rolled
In a great swell with oily gradual heaves,
Which rolled her down until her time-bells tolled,
Clang, and the weltering water moaned like beeves.
And the next verse reiterates the prophecies of the moving waters:
Like the march of doom
Came those great powers of marching silences;
Then fog came down, dead-cold, and hid the seas.
The night was spent in dread of fog, in dread of ice, and the ship seemed to respond to the dread of the men as her horn called out into the impenetrable wilderness of mists and waters:
She bayed there like a solitary hound
Lost in a covert.
Morning came, bringing no release from fear:
So the night passed, but then no morning broke—
Only a something showed that night was dead.
A sea-bird, cackling like a devil, spoke,
And the fog drew away and hung like lead.
Like mighty cliffs it shaped, sullen and red;
Like glowering gods at watch it did appear,
And sometimes drew away, and then drew near.
Then suddenly swooped down the immense black fiend of the storm, catching, as the Bosun put it, the ship "in her ball-dress."
The blackness crunched all memory of the sun.
Henceforth we have a tale of white fear changing into heroism as Dauber clambers to his giddy place in the rigging, and goes out on the yard to his task,