Seafarer
'Bright plates and pannikins
To sail the seas around,
And a new donkey's breakfast
For the outward bound!'
Shanghaied in San Francisco
We brought up in Bombay
Where they put us afloat in an old Leith boat
That steered like a stack of hay.
We've sweltered in the Tropics
When the pitch boiled through the deck-
And saved our hides and little besides
In an ice-cold North Sea wreck.
We've drunk our rum in Portland
And we've thrashed through Bering Strait-
And we've toed the mark on a Yankee barque
With a hard-case Down-east mate.
We know the streets of Santos
And the loom of the lone Azores-
We've eat our grub from a salt-horse tub
Condemned from the Navy stores.
We know the quay of Glasgow
And the river at Saigon-
We've drunk our glass with a Chinese lass
In a house-boat at Canton.
We know the road to Auckland
And the light on Sydney Head-
And we've crept close-hauled when the leadsman called
The depth of the Channel bed.
They pay us off in London
And it's 'O for a spell ashore!'
But again we ship for the Southern trip
In a week or hardly more
For- it's 'Goodbye Sally and Sue'
And- 'It's time to get afloat-'
With an aching head and a straw-stuffed bed,
And a knife and an oil-skin coat.
Sing- 'Time to leave her, Johnny!'
Sing- 'Bound for the Rio Grande!'
When the tug turns back you follow her track
For a last, long look at land.
Then the purple disappears-
And only the blue is seen-
That will take our bones to Davy Jones
And our souls to Fiddler's Green.
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:27 min read
- 122 Views
Quick analysis:
Scheme | ABXB CDED AFAF GHCH AAXA CXAI GJXJ IKXK AEJE XLXL AMAM |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,439 |
Words | 283 |
Stanzas | 11 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4 |
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"Seafarer" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 10 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/3452/seafarer>.
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