The breakers were right beneath her bows, 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 Look’d soft as carded wool, But the cruel rocks, they gored her sides 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, Ho! ho! the breakers roared!
At day-break, on the bleak sea-beach A fisherman stood aghast, To see the form of a maiden fair Lashed close to a drifting mast.
The salt sea was frozen on her breast, The salt tears in her eyes; And he saw her hair like the brown sea-weed On the billows fall and rise.
Such was the wreck of the Hesperus, In the midnight and the snow! Christ save us all from a death like this, On the reef of Norman’s Woe!
[ THE DOG AND THE WATER-LILY]
The noon was shady, and soft airs Swept Ouse’s silent tide, When, ’scaped from literary cares, I wander’d on his side.