Part 18 (1/2)
How are things going with you? Will you have some coffee?
Well, of course it's trying sometimes, but never mind, It will probably be all right. Carry on, and keep cheerful.
I shouldn't, if I were you, meet trouble half-way, It is always best to take everything as it comes.
LATE SNOW
The heavy train through the dim country went rolling, rolling, Interminably pa.s.sing misty snow-covered plough-land ridges That merged in the snowy sky; came turning meadows, fences, Came gullies and pa.s.sed, and ice-coloured streams under frozen bridges.
Across the travelling landscape evenly drooped and lifted The telegraph wires, thick ropes of snow in the windless air; They drooped and paused and lifted again to unseen summits, Drawing the eyes and soothing them, often, to a drowsy stare.
Singly in the snow the ghosts of trees were softly pencilled, Fainter and fainter, in distance fading, into nothingness gliding, But sometimes a crowd of the intricate silver trees of fairyland Pa.s.sed, close and intensely clear, the phantom world hiding.
O untroubled these moving mantled miles of shadowless shadows, And lovely the film of falling flakes; so wayward and slack; But I thought of many a mother-bird screening her nestlings, Sitting silent with wide bright eyes, snow on her back.
FRANCIS BRETT YOUNG
SEASCAPE
Over that morn hung heaviness, until, Near sunless noon, we heard the s.h.i.+p'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 carca.s.s 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 cl.u.s.tered 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 Hoa.r.s.ely behind his hand: 'Now, all together!'
The hatch-cover is tilted; a mummy of sailcloth Well ballasted with iron shoots clear of the p.o.o.p; 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!'