The Phantom Ship
Flames the shuttle of the lightning across the driving sleet,
Ay, and shakes in sea-green waverings along the fishers’ street;
Gone the stars and gone the white moon, gone and puffed away and dead.
Never storm arose so swiftly; scarce the children were in bed,
Scarce the old and wizen houses had their doors and windows shut.
Ah! it dwelt within the twilight as the worm within the nut.
“Waken, waken, sleepy fishers; no hour is this for sleep,”
Cries a voice at roaring midnight beside the moonless deep.
Half dizzy with the lightning there runs a gathering band—
“Watcher, wherefore have ye called us?” Eyes go after his lean hand,
And the fisher men and women from the dripping harbour wall
See the darkness slow disgorging a vessel blind with squall.
“Bring the ropes now! Stand ye by now! See, she rounds the harbour clear.
God! they’re mad to fly such canvas!” Ah! what bell-notes do they hear?
Say what ringer rings at midnight; for, in the belfry high,
Slow the chapel bell is tolling as though the dead passed by.
Round she comes in stays before them; cease the winds, and on their poles
Cease the sails their flapping uproar, and the hull no longer rolls.
Now a scream from all those fishers, for there on deck there be
All the drowned that ever were drowned from that village by the sea;
And the ghastly ghost-flames glimmer all along the taffrail rails
On the drowned men’s hands and faces, on the spars and on the sails.
Hush’d the fishers, till a mother calls by name her drownèd son;
Then each wife and maid and mother calls by name some drownèd one.
Stands each grey and silent phantom on the same regardless spot—
Joys and fears in their grey faces that the live earth knoweth not;
Down the vapours fall and hide them from the children of a day,
And the winds come down and blow them with the vapours far away.
Hang the mist-threads for a little while like cobwebs in the air;
Then the stars grow out of heaven with their countenances fair.
“Pray for the souls in purgatory,” the pale priest trembling cries.
Prayed those forgotten fishers, till in the eastern skies
Came olive fires of morning and on the darkness fed,
By the slow heaving ocean—mumbling mother of the dead.