A Song of the English

 
At risk of shoal or main
(By day nor yet by night)
 
 
But standeth even so
As now we witness here,
While men depart, of joyful heart
Adventure for to know
(As now bear witness here!)
 

II

 
We have fed our sea for a thousand years
And she calls us, still unfed,
Though there’s never a wave of all her waves
But marks our English dead:
We have strawed our best to the weed’s unrest
To the shark and the sheering gull.
If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we ha’ paid in full!
 
 
There’s never a flood goes shoreward now
But lifts a keel we manned;
There’s never an ebb goes seaward now
But drops our dead on the sand —
But slinks our dead on the sands forlore,
From the Ducies to the Swin.
If blood be the price of admiralty,
If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we ha’ paid it in!
 
 
We must feed our sea for a thousand years,
For that is our doom and pride,
As it was when they sailed with the Golden Hind,
Or the wreck that struck last tide —
Or the wreck that lies on the spouting reef
Where the ghastly blue-lights flare.
If blood be the price of admiralty,
If blood be the price of admiralty,
If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we ha’ bought it fair!
 

THE DEEP-SEA CABLES

 
The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar —
Down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are.
There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,
Or the great grey level plains of ooze where the shell-buried cables creep.
 
 
Here in the womb of the world – here on the tie-ribs of earth
Words, and the words of men, flicker and flutter and beat —
Warning, sorrow and gain, salutation and mirth —
For a Power troubles the Still that has neither voice nor feet.
 
 
They have wakened the timeless Things; they have killed their father Time;
Joining hands in the gloom, a league from the last of the sun.
Hush! Men talk to-day o’er the waste of the ultimate slime,
And a new Word runs between: whispering, ‘Let us be one!’