Our chief on deck up sprung,
We lay too in that hollow deep—
Below, as our voices and trampling rung,
The sleepers sprang from sleep.
The boat we loosed and lower’d,
There were gallant hearts to go,
The dark clouds broke that the moon embower’d,
And her lights shone cheering through.
And we watch’d that little boat
Pull up the mountain wave,
Then sink from view, like a name forgot,
Within an ancient grave.
They go—they climb the hull,
As the waters wash the deck,
They shout, and they hear but the billows dull
Strike on that lonely wreck.
The skeletons of men
Lay blanch’d and marrowless there,
But clothed in their living garb, as when
That ’reft ship was their care.
Lash’d to their planks they lay,
The ropes still round them tied,
Though drifted long leagues in that stormy bay,
Since they hoped, despaired, and died.
Tombless in their decay,
Mid the watery solitude,
Days dawn’d upon them and faded away,
Cold moons their death-sleep view’d.
Their names no trace may tell,
Nor whither their passage bound,
And our seamen leave the desolate hull
With death and darkness round.
They tread their deck again,
And silent hoist their boat—
They think of the fate of the unknown men
Who for years may wildly float.
Those bones, that ocean bier,
They well may sadly see,
For they feel that the gallant ship they steer,
Their sepulchre may be.