Classic Poem

We stood on the haunted island,
We stood by the haunted bay;
The stars were all over the skyland,
But the moon had loitered away.

The lights of fisher-boats glimmered,
The beacon was steady and red,
The harbor icily shimmered
Like the bodeful eye of the dead.

Then came the terror of ocean,
The fiend of the island came,
A vessel with ghostlike motion,
A bark with canvass of flame.

It shone with vaporous brightness,
A glamour of tremulous rays;
It was not fire, but the whiteness
Of a ghost of a perished blaze.

We watched it with wondering vision,
We watched it doubting and dumb;
We had heard of the thing with derision,
But we surely beheld it come.

We saw it glide o'er the water,
A phantom of pallid fire;
We saw it tumble and totter
To ruin, and then flash higher.

Again and again to leeward,
Its ghastly rigging fell o'er;
At last, far away to seaward,
It foundered and rose no more.

We had watched it with straining vision,
We had watched it with eye and glass;
But gone were doubt and derision,
For surely we saw it pass.

Through many a winter and summer,
As the sons of the island know,
The gleam of this vampyre comer
Has prophesied storm and woe:

This ghost of a great three-master
That went in the days of yore
To fell and fiery disaster
Right off the Block Island shore.