Robed, crowned and throned, he wove his spell, Where heart-blood beat or hearth-smoke curled With unconsidered miracle, Hedged in a backward-gazing world: Then taught his chosen bard to say: "The King was with us--yesterday!"
Will you conquer my heart with your beauty, my soul going out from afar? Shall I fall to your hand as a victim of crafty and cautious _shikar_?
Have I met you and passed you already, unknowing, unthinking, and blind Shall I meet you next session at Simla, oh, sweetest and best of your kind?
Ah, Goddess! child, spinster, or widow--as of old on Mars Hill when they raised To the God that they knew not an altar--so I, a young Pagan, have praised.
The Goddess I know not nor worship; yet if half that men tell me be true, You will come in the future, and therefore these verses are written to you.
Oh, gallant was our galley from her carven steering-wheel To her figurehead of silver and her beak of hammered steel; The leg-bar chafed the ankle, and we gasped for cooler air, But no galley on the water with our galley could compare!
Our bulkheads bulged with cotton and our masts were stepped in gold-- We ran a mighty merchandise of Negroes in the hold; The white foam spun behind us, and the black shark swam below, As we gripped the kicking sweep-head and we made that galley go.
It was merry in the galley, for we revelled now and then-- If they wore us down like cattle, faith, we fought and loved like men! As we snatched her through the water, so we snatched a minute's bliss, And the mutter of the dying never spoiled the lover's kiss.
Our women and our children toiled beside us in the dark-- They died, we filed their fetters, and we heaved them to the shark-- We heaved them to the fishes, but so fast the galley sped, We had only time to envy, for we could not mourn our dead.
Bear witness, once my comrades, what a hard-bit gang were we-- The servants of the sweep-head, but the masters of the sea! By the hands that drove her forward as she plunged and yawed and sheered, Woman, Man, or God, or Devil, was there anything we feared?
Was it storm? Our fathers faced it, and a wilder never blew; Earth that waited for the wreckage watched the galley struggle through. Burning noon or choking midnight, Sickness, Sorrow, Parting, Death? Nay our very babes would mock you, had they time for idle breath.