Collected Poems: Volume Two. Alfred Noyes
The sleeve was a trick of the trade.
"You've heard of sperrits, no doubt;
Well, there's more in the matter than that!
But he wasn't the patch and he wasn't the sleeve,
And he wasn't the laced cocked-hat.
"Nelson was just—a Ghost! You may laugh! But the Devonshire men They knew that he'd come when England called, And they know that he'll come again.
"I'll tell you the way it was
(For none of the landsmen know),
And to tell it you right, you must go a-starn
Two hundred years or so.
* * * *
"The waves were lapping and slapping
The same as they are to-day;
And Drake lay dying aboard his ship
In Nombre Dios Bay.
"The scent of the foreign flowers
Came floating all around;
'But I'd give my soul for the smell o' the pitch,'
Says he, 'in Plymouth Sound.'
"'What shall I do,' he says,
'When the guns begin to roar,
An' England wants me, and me not there
To shatter 'er foes once more?'
"(You've heard what he said, maybe,
But I'll mark you the p'ints again;
For I want you to box your compass right
And get my story plain.)
"'You must take my drum,' he says,
'To the old sea-wall at home;
And if ever you strike that drum,' he says,
'Why, strike me blind, I'll come!
"'If England needs me, dead
Or living, I'll rise that day!
I'll rise from the darkness under the sea
Ten thousand miles away.'
"That's what he said; and he died,
An' his pirates, listenin' roun',
With their crimson doublets and jewelled swords
That flashed as the sun went down,
"They sewed him up in his shroud
With a round-shot top and toe,
To sink him under the salt sharp sea
Where all good seamen go.
"They lowered him down in the deep,
And there in the sunset light
They boomed a broadside over his grave,
As meanin' to say 'Good-night.'
"They sailed away in the dark
To the dear little isle they knew;
And they hung his drum by the old sea-wall
The same as he told them to.
* * * *
"Two hundred years went by,
And the guns began to roar,
And England was fighting hard for her life,
As ever she fought of yore.
"'It's only my dead that count,'
She said, as she says to-day;
'It isn't the ships and it isn't the guns
'Ull sweep Trafalgar's Bay.'
"D'you guess who Nelson was?
You may laugh, but it's true as true!
There was more in that pore little chawed-up chap
Than ever his best friend knew.
"The foe was creepin' close,
In the dark, to our white-cliffed isle;
They were ready to leap at England's throat,
When—O, you may smile, you may smile;
"But—ask of the Devonshire men;
For they heard in the dead of night
The roll of a drum, and they saw him pass On a ship all shining white.
"He stretched out his dead cold face
And he sailed in the grand old way!
The fishes had taken an eye and his arm,
But he swept Trafalgar's Bay.
"Nelson—was Francis Drake!
O, what matters the uniform,
Or the patch on your eye or your pinned-up sleeve,
If your soul's like a North Sea storm?"
EDINBURGH
I
City of mist and rain and blown grey spaces,
Dashed with wild wet colour and gleam of tears,
Dreaming in Holyrood halls of the passionate faces
Lifted to one Queen's face that has conquered the years,
Are not the halls of thy memory haunted places?
Cometh there not as a moon (where the blood-rust sears
Floors a-flutter of old with silks and laces),
Gliding, a ghostly Queen, thro' a mist of tears?
II
Proudly here, with a loftier pinnacled splendour,
Throned in his northern Athens, what spells remain
Still on the marble lips of the Wizard, and render
Silent the gazer on glory without a stain! Here and here, do we whisper, with hearts more tender,
Tusitala wandered thro' mist and rain;
Rainbow-eyed and frail and gallant and slender,
Dreaming of pirate-isles in a jewelled main.
III
Up the Canongate climbeth, cleft asunder
Raggedly here, with a glimpse of the distant sea
Flashed through a crumbling alley, a glimpse of wonder,
Nay, for the City is throned on Eternity!
Hark! from the soaring castle a cannon's thunder
Closeth an hour for the world and an æon for me,
Gazing at last from the martial heights whereunder
Deathless memories roll to an ageless sea.
IN A RAILWAY CARRIAGE
Three long isles of sunset-cloud,
Poised in an ocean of gold,
Floated away in the west
As the long train southward rolled;
And through the gleam and shade of the panes,
While meadow and wood went by,
Across the streaming earth
We watched the steadfast sky.
Dark