The Little Mariner

Ay, sitting on your happy hearths, beside your mother’s knee, How should you know the miseries and dangers of the sea! My father was a mariner, and from my earliest years, I can remember, night and day, my mother’s prayers and tears. I can remember how she sighed when blew the stormy gale; And how for days she stood to watch the long-expected sail: Hers was a silent, patient grief; but fears and long delay, And wakeful nights and anxious days were wearing her away.

And when the gusty winds were loud, and autumn leaves were red, I watched, with heavy heart, beside my mother’s dying bed; Just when her voice was feeblest, the neighbors came to say, The ship was hailed an hour before, and then was in the bay.

Alas! too late the ship returned, too late her life to save; My father closed her dying eyes, and laid her in the grave. He was a man of ardent hopes, who never knew dismay; And, spite of grief, the winter time wore cheerfully away.

He had crossed the equinoctial line, full seven times or more, And sailing northward, had been wrecked on icy Labrador: He knew the Spicy-isles, every one, where the clove and nutmeg grow, And the aloe towers a stately tree with clustering bells of snow.

He had gone the length of Hindostan, down Ganges’ holy flood; Through Persia, where the peacock broods a wild bird of the wood; And, in the forests of the West, had seen the red-deer chased, And dwelt beneath the piny woods, a hunter of the waste.

Oh! pleasant were the tales he told of lands so strange and new; And, in my ignorance I vowed, I’d be a sailor too: My father heard my vow with joy,—so in the early May, We went on board a merchant-man, bound for Honduras’ bay.