Seascape

Over that morn hung heaviness, until,     Near sunless noon, we heard the ship's bell beating     A melancholy staccato on dead metal;     Saw the bare-footed watch come running aft;     Felt, far below, the sudden telegraph jangle     Its harsh metallic challenge, thrice repeated:     'Stand to. Half-speed ahead. Slow. Stop her!'                                                                 They stopped.     The plunging pistons sank like a stopped heart:     She held, she swayed, a hulk, a hollow carcass     Of blistered iron that the grey-green, waveless,     Unruffled tropic waters slapped languidly.     And, in that pause, a sinister whisper ran:     Burial at Sea! a Portuguese official ...     Poor fever-broken devil from Mozambique:     Came on half tight: the doctor calls it heat-stroke.     Why do they travel steerage? It's the exchange:     So many million 'reis' to the pound!     What did he look like? No one ever saw him:     Took to his bunk, and drank and drank and died.     They're ready! Silence!                                              We clustered to the rail,     Curious and half-ashamed. The well-deck spread     A comfortable gulf of segregation     Between ourselves and death. 'Burial at sea' ...     The master holds a black book at arm's length;     His droning voice comes for'ard: 'This our brother ...     We therefore commit his body to the deep     To be turned into corruption' ... The bo's'n whispers     Hoarsely behind his hand: 'Now, all together!'     The hatch-cover is tilted; a mummy of sailcloth     Well ballasted with iron shoots clear of the poop;     Falls, like a diving gannet. The green sea closes     Its burnished skin; the snaky swell smoothes over ...     While he, the man of the steerage, goes down, down,     Feet foremost, sliding swiftly down the dim water,     Swift to escape     Those plunging shapes with pale, empurpled bellies     That swirl and veer about him. He goes down     Unerringly, as though he knew the way     Through green, through gloom, to absolute watery darkness,     Where no weed sways nor curious fin quivers:     To the sad, sunless deeps where, endlessly,     A downward drift of death spreads its wan mantle     In the wave-moulded valleys that shall enfold him     Till the sea give up its dead.     There shall he lie dispersed amid great riches:     Such gold, such arrogance, so many bold hearts!     All the sunken armadas pressed to powder     By weight of incredible seas! That mingled wrack     No livening sun shall visit till the crust     Of earth be riven, or this rolling planet     Reel on its axis; till the moon-chained tides,     Unloosed, deliver up that white Atlantis     Whose naked peaks shall bleach above the slaked     Thirst of Sahara, fringed by weedy tangles     Of Atlas's drown'd cedars, frowning eastward     To where the sands of India lie cold,     And heap'd Himalaya's a rib of coral     Slowly uplifted, grain on grain....                                                                      We dream     Too long! Another jangle of alarum     Stabs at the engines: 'Slow. Half-speed. Full-speed!'     The great bearings rumble; the screw churns, frothing     Opaque water to downward-swelling plumes     Milky as wood-smoke. A shoal of flying-fish     Spurts out like animate spray. The warm breeze wakens;     And we pass on, forgetting,     Toward the solemn horizon of bronzed cumulus     That bounds our brooding sea, gathering gloom     That, when night falls, will dissipate in flaws     Of watery lightning, washing the hot sky,     Cleansing all hearts of heat and restlessness,     Until, with day, another blue be born.