Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, A DIRGE FOR THE DEEP-SEA TRAWLER, by THOMAS EKENHEAD MAYNE


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

A DIRGE FOR THE DEEP-SEA TRAWLER, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: From the mouth of the rolling humber
Last Line: To the sullen humber's flow.
Subject(s): Sea; Ocean


FROM the mouth of the rolling Humber
To where Thames' grey waters sweep,
They are laid in their beds to slumber
Far down in the hoary deep.

From the waves that lash upon Dover
Across to the Netherlands,
They rest with their toils all over
And moulder away in the sands.

From Denmark's savage surges
To the tides that on Orkney beat,
The blasts are singing the dirges
Of the men of the fishing fleet.

The winds that cut like sabres
And the bleak and biting wave,
Are lulling them after their labours
And moaning o'er one wide grave.

The hungry sea that holds them
Is for ever insatiate,
And down in the weed that infolds them
The crab and the dog-fish wait.

Where mightily rise the breezes
And smite the surge aloft,
Where the spray-sheet falls and freezes,
Where the caps of the waves are doffed,

Where the smack is gulfed in the furrows
And rises again on the crest,
Where the boom in the roller burrows --
Death's empire is mightiest.

The sea-birds call to each other
Far out in the storm-stream wild
Like the scream of a widowed mother,
Like the cry of an orphaned child.

But where is the heart that falters
Though the cloud-rack bears the squall,
Or his path o'er the billows alters,
Or shrinks from his work at the trawl?

To battle against the despoiler,
And fight in the teeth of the gale,
To the life of the deep-sea toiler,
And Death shall he make him quail?

No! -- when the foam-clots dapple
The face of the threatening flood,
And at length in the last death-grapple
They are England's dauntless blood.

Ah! vain are the North Sea's pledges
And earnests of sunlight smile;
They shall find his bones in the dredges
And know how her vows beguile.

Ah! false are her ways when fairly
She trembles in wind-borne light,
When the tripping breezes barely
Tip the azure waves with white.

She is false -- for her rages follow
At the skirts of her moments gay,
And the roar of her wrath is hollow
As the howl of a beast of prey.

And ever the crests roll over
While the smacksman lies below,
From the waves that lash upon Dover
To the sullen Humber's flow.





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