Arthur Quiller-Couch, comp. The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse. 1922.
The MarinersMargaret L. Woods (18561945)
T
The wild wind comes up from the sea,
It wails round the tower, and it blows through the grasses,
It scatters the sand o’er the graves where it passes
And the sound and the scent of the sea.
They beat on the church by the shore,
They rush round the grave-stones aslant to the leeward,
And the wall and the mariners’ graves lying seaward,
That are bank’d with the stones from the shore.
Like a beast from the lair of the storm,
To claim with its ravenous leap and to mingle
The mariners’ bones with the surf and the shingle
That it rolls round the shore in the storm.
But the sea and the slow-moving sky,
Where a cloud from the grey lifts the gleam of its edges,
Where the foam flashes white from the shouldering ridges,
As they crowd on the uttermost sky.
Far away there ’s a shrine by the sea;
The pale women climb up the path to it slowly,
To pray to Our Lady of Storms ere they wholly
Despair of their men from the sea.
Where once from the shell-broider’d sand
They would watch for the sails coming in from far places,
Are forgetting the ships and forgetting the faces
Lying here, lying hid in the sand.
The grandames look out o’er the surf,
They reckon their dead and their long years of sadness,
And they shake their lean fists at the sea and its madness,
And curse the white fangs of the surf.
They hear not the sound of the sea,
Nor the hum from the church where the psalm is uplifted,
Nor the crying of birds that above them are drifted.
The mariners sleep by the sea.