"O father! I hear the sound of guns, O say, what may it be?" "Some ship in distress, that cannot live In such an angry sea!"
"O father! I see a gleaming light,45 O say, what may it be?" But the father answered never a word, A frozen corpse was he.
Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark, With his face turned to the skies,50 The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow On his fixed and glassy eyes.
Then the maiden clasped her hands and prayed That savèd she might be; And she thought of Christ, who stilled the wave, On the Lake of Galilee.56
And fast through the midnight dark and drear, Through the whistling sleet and snow, Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept Towards the reef of Norman's Woe.60
And ever the fitful gusts between, A sound came from the land; It was the sound of the trampling surf, On the rocks and the hard sea-sand.
The breakers were right beneath her bows,65 She drifted a dreary wreck, And a whooping billow swept the crew Like icicles from her deck.
She struck where the white and fleecy waves Looked soft as carded wool,70 But the cruel rocks, they gored her side Like the horns of an angry bull.
Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice, With the masts went by the board; Like a vessel of glass, she stove and sank,75 Ho! ho! the breakers roared!
At daybreak on the bleak sea-beach, A fisherman stood aghast, To see the form of a maiden fair, Lashed close to a drifting mast.80