The clinker-built cutter lifts her pride where the steel-grey rollers run,
White cloud is clewed to the spar’s tall reach in the eye of the fleeting sun;
Her bowsprit gleams like a silver lance where the dolphin squadrons weave,
And the spume is hurled in the level gusts the whitecaps rise to heave.
The helm’s a-lee and the timbers strain to the song of the growing gale,
While the bow drives down through a foaming trough on the start of the southern trail;
The reefed cloud clings to the fore and mizzen, tight-bound by the seaman’s hand,
As the storm-jib waits in the bated hush where the edge of the tempests stand.
The grey skies scud with a ragged wrath as the swells grow long and deep,
And the wind takes hold of the cutter’s soul in a pact no man may keep;
Her shrouds are humming with voices old from the age of oak and tar,
And the sea gives back what the sea has claimed in the wake of a wandering star.
A brief sun strikes through the shattered vault to the glint of the streaming deck,
And the cutter leans to the southern call with the storm still at her neck;
The keel bites hard on the driving surge where the darkling valleys lie,
And the foam flies high from the leeward rail to the thunder in the sky.
Southward ho! where the chart runs bare and the deep-lane swells abide,
Where the old dreams wait in the trade-wind’s breath and the long horizons ride;
The heart beats fast in the salted air with a trust no storm can drown,
For the sea still calls to the hand on helm and the soul that will not down.
We dream again on the seaward road where the keel meets fate anew,
Where the night brings fire to the dancing wake and the dawn brings sapphire hue;
For the deep runs dark and the deep runs wide, yet the cutter holds her way,
Till the southern cross comes wheeling up through the spray of another day.
(By John Shenton)