DLTK's Poems
The Wreck of the
Hesperus
A horribly depressing poem, but one of his most famous and a good example of narrative poetry. It's mostly based on a true story with a bit of poetic license (there was a 12 hour blizzard in 1839- 20 ships were destroyed off the east coast of the US... Norman's Woe is a real place.
It was the schooner Hesperus,
That
sailed the wintry sea;
And the skipper had taken his little daughter,
To bear him company.
Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax,
Her cheeks like the dawn of day,
And her bosom white as the hawthorn
buds,
That ope in the month of May.
The skipper
he stood beside the helm,
His pipe was in his month,
And he watched how the veering flaw did blow
The smoke
now West, now South.
Then up and spake an old Sailor,
Had sailed to the Spanish Main,
"I pray thee, put into yonder port,
For I fear a hurricane.
"Last night, the moon had a golden ring,
And to-night no moon we see!"
The skipper, he blew a whiff from his
pipe,
And a scornful laugh laughed he.
Colder and
louder blew the wind,
A gale from the Northeast.
The
snow fell hissing in the brine,
And the billows frothed
like yeast.
Down came the storm, and smote amain
The vessel in its strength;
She shuddered and paused, like a frighted
steed,
Then leaped her cable's length.
"Come
hither! come hither! my little daughter,
And do not
tremble so;
For I can weather the roughest gale
That
ever wind did blow."
He wrapped her warm in his seaman's coat
Against the stinging blast;
He cut a rope from a broken spar,
And bound her to the mast.
"O father! I hear the church-bells
ring,
O say, what may it be?"
"'Tis a fog-bell on a
rock-bound coast!"--
And he steered for the open sea.
"O father! I hear the sound of guns,
O say, what may
it be?"
"Some ship in distress, that cannot live
In
such an angry sea!"
"O father! I see a gleaming light
O say, what may it be?"
But the father answered never a word,
A frozen corpse was he.
Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark,
With his face turned to the skies,
The lantern gleamed through the
gleaming snow
On his fixed and glassy eyes.
Then
the maiden clasped her hands and prayed
That saved she
might be;
And she thought of Christ, who stilled the wave,
On the Lake of Galilee.
And fast through the midnight dark and
drear,
Through the whistling sleet and snow,
Like a
sheeted ghost, the vessel swept
Tow'rds the reef of
Norman's Woe.
And ever the fitful gusts between
A
sound came from the land;
It was the sound of the trampling surf
On the rocks and the hard sea-sand.
The breakers were right
beneath her bows,
She drifted a dreary wreck,
And a
whooping billow swept the crew
Like icicles from her
deck.
She struck where the white and fleecy waves
Looked soft as carded wool,
But the cruel rocks, they gored her side
Like the horns of an angry bull.
Her rattling shrouds, all
sheathed in ice,
With the masts went by the board;
Like a vessel of glass, she stove and sank,
Ho! ho! the
breakers roared!
At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach,
A fisherman stood aghast,
To see the form of a maiden fair,
Lashed close to a drifting mast.
The salt sea was frozen on her
breast,
The salt tears in her eyes;
And he saw her
hair, like the brown sea-weed,
On the billows fall and
rise.
Such was the wreck of the Hesperus,
In the
midnight and the snow!
Christ save us all from a death like this,
On the reef of Norman's Woe!
