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- Weeks passed; and at my window, leaving bed,
By night I mused, of easeful sleep bereft,
On those ‘brave boys (Ah War! thy theft);
Some marching feet
Found pause at last by cliffs Potomac cleft;
Wakeful I mused, while in the street
Far footfalls died away till none were left.
THE STONE FLEET
_An Old Sailor’s Lament_
December, 1861
I have a feeling for those ships,
Each worn and ancient one,
With great bluff bows, and broad in the beam:
Ay, it was unkindly done.
But so they serve the Obsolete—
Even so, Stone Fleet!
You’ll say I’m doting; do you think
I scudded round the Horn in one—
The _Tenedos,_ a glorious
Good old craft as ever run—
Sunk (how all unmeet!)
With the Old Stone Fleet.
An India ship of fame was she,
Spices and shawls and fans she bore;
A whaler when the wrinkles came—
Turned off! till, spent and poor,
Her bones were sold (escheat)!
Ah! Stone Fleet.
Four were erst patrician keels
(Names attest what families be),
The _Kensington,_ and _Richmond_ too,
_Leonidas,_ and _Lee_:
But now they have their seat
With the Old Stone Fleet.
To scuttle them—a pirate deed—
Sack them, and dismast;
They sunk so slow, they died so hard,
But gurgling dropped at last.
Their ghosts in gales repeat
_Woe’s us, Stone Fleet!_
And all for naught. The waters pass—
Currents will have their way;
Nature is nobody’s ally; ’tis well;
The harbor is bettered—will stay.
A failure, and complete,
Was your Old Stone Fleet.
THE TEMERAIRE
_Supposed to have been suggested to an Englishman of the old order by
the fight of the Monitor and Merrimac_
The gloomy hulls in armor grim,
Like clouds o’er moors have met,
And prove that oak, and iron, and man
Are tough in fibre yet.
But Splendors wane. The sea-fight yields
No front of old display;
The garniture, emblazonment,
And heraldry all decay.
Towering afar in parting light,
The fleets like Albion’s forelands shine—
The full-sailed fleets, the shrouded show
Of Ships-of-the-Line.
The fighting _Temeraire,_
Built of a thousand trees,
Lunging out her lightnings,
And beetling o’er the seas—
O Ship, how brave and fair,
That fought so oft and well,
On open decks you manned the gun Armorial.
What cheerings did you share,
Impulsive in the van,
When down upon leagued France and Spain
We English ran—
The freshet at your bowsprit
Like the foam upon the can.
Bickering, your colors
Licked up the Spanish air,
You flapped with flames of battle-flags—
Your challenge, _Temeraire!_
The rear ones of our fleet
They yearned to share your place,
Still vying with the Victory
Throughout that earnest race—
The Victory, whose Admiral,
With orders nobly won,
Shone in the globe of the battle glow—
The angel in that sun.
Parallel in story,
Lo, the stately pair,
As late in grapple ranging,
The foe between them there—
When four great hulls lay tiered,
And the fiery tempest cleared,
And your prizes twain appeared, _Temeraire!_
But Trafalgar is over now,
The quarter-deck undone;
The carved and castled navies fire
Their evening-gun.
O, Titan _Temeraire,_
Your stern-lights fade away;
Your bulwarks to the years must yield,
And heart-of-oak decay.
A pigmy steam-tug tows you,
Gigantic, to the shore—
Dismantled of your guns and spars,
And sweeping wings of war.
The rivets clinch the iron clads,
Men learn a deadlier lore;
But Fame has nailed your battle-flags—
Your ghost it sails before:
O, the navies old and oaken,
O, the _Temeraire_ no more!
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