Classic Poem

" Old Salt " had been a pirate in his youth
And sailed a clipper on the Carib seas;
Grown old, his godless crew had marooned him
Upon the Cocos Isles; he was picked up
By a tramp trader and brought into port.
Then he forsook the sea and kept an inn
That held a record of unsavory brawls.
There the old fearfulness that cowed his men
Upon the sea, still compassed him around;
The ghostly tapping of his old peg leg,
The empty eye-socket that glared at us,
The crimson rag that bound his unkempt hair
Conjured up memories of murdered men
To us green landlubbers up in the hills.

Yet when he stood before you in the flesh
There was a look upon his face that seared
The grosser passions like a sheeted flame.
Mayhap you've seen a man that's coastwise bred
Shut in the mountains pining for the sea,
The wash of island tides within his ears,
The whistling of the storms within his brain
And hunger for adventure in his heart?
There where the hills leap upwards to the sky,
Blue overlapping blue in serried lines,
He saw the tumbling hillocks of the sea
Breaking to leeward on a sunken shoal
And felt the creaking timbers neath his feet.

Before the fire, there poured the richest tune
From his cracked throat: what wild adventure lay
Beyond the spinning of the salt sea spume,
What gold lay hid on the uncharted isles
Beyond the Spanish Main, — the tune ran on
Through seamen's jargon and coarse ribaldry.

" The clipper's beams a-moaning,
The combers curling in,
The hawse pipes answering with a groan
As comforting as sin.

" With bow a-raking forward
And masts a-raking aft,
We ratched against the heavy swells
Until her timbers laughed.

" Oh free and bold we sailed our way
And lightly homeward bound;
We drove the silly merchantmen,
The crew we mostly drowned.

" Oh light we rode the oily swell ,
The Rover's flag flung free,
And I'd been on her, lad, today
But a cut-throat " Seventy-three"

" Hugged our heels in a tearing gale —
My leg was shot away;
A squall blew up and stopped the chase,
Or I'd not be here to-day.

" We sheered along with tops'ls free
And flaws a-bracing in,
The bowsprit prancing to the stars,
The swells a-breaking thin.

" Hull down, the frigate dove from sight
Warped by a westering wind;
Her gear was tattered by our shot,
Our wheel had gone dead blind. "
. . . . . . . .

They buried " Old Salt " up there in the hills,
Back of the Inn, upon a meadow slope
Where in the summer time the rising wind
Mimics the waves in swells of timothy.
I feel his bones — unquiet in the mold —
Are aching for the stinging, spitting sea,
To lie on some drowned hulk within the deep
Where bones of seamen watch o'er pirate gold,
Sewn up with sea weed, till the Last Trump sounds.
His hoard of silver bought a velvet bed
For his last sleep. How could those landsmen know
An old tarpaulin would have made him glad.