Outward Bound

Good luck to all our fightin' ships that rule the English sea; Good luck to our brave merchantmen wherever they may be; The sea it is their highway, an' we've got to sweep it free For the ships passin' over the North Sea ground.

width=350px|ON this primeval strip of western land, With purple bays and tongues of shining sand, Time, like an echoing tide, Moves drowsily in idle ebb and flow; The sunshine slumbers in the tangled grass And homely folk with simple greeting pass As to their worship or their work they go. Man, earth, and sea Seem linked in elemental harmony And my insurgent sorrow finds release In dreams of peace.

But silent, grey, Out of the curtained haze, Across the bay Two fierce destroyers glide with bows afoam And predatory gaze, Like cormorants that seek a submerged prey. An angel of destruction guards the door And keeps the peace of our ancestral home; Freedom to dream, to work, and to adore, These vagrant days, nights of untroubled breath, Are bought with death. Henry Head

THERE'S a waterfall I'm leaving Running down the rocks in foam, There's a pool for which I'm grieving Near the water-ouzel's home, And it's there that I'd be lying With the heather close at hand And the curlews faintly crying 'Mid the wastes of Cumberland.

While the midnight watch is winging Thoughts of other days arise, I can hear the river singing Like the saints in Paradise; I can see the water winking Like the merry eyes of Pan, And the slow half-pounder sinking By the bridge's granite span.

Ah! to win them back and clamber Braced anew with winds I love, From the river's stainless amber To the morning mist above, See through cloud-rifts rent asunder, Like a painted scroll unfurled, Ridge and hollow rolling under To the fringes of the world.

Now the weary guard are sleeping, Now the great propellers churn, Now the harbour lights are creeping Into emptiness astern, While the sentry wakes and watches Plunging triangles of light Where the water leaps and catches At our escort in the night.

Great their happiness who seeing Still with unbenighted eyes Kin of theirs who gave them being, Sun and earth that made them wise, Die and feel their embers quicken Year by year in summer time, When the cotton grasses thicken On the hills they used to climb.

Shall we also be as they be, Mingled with our mother clay, Or return no more, it may be? Who has knowledge, who shall say? Yet we hope that from the bosom Of our shaggy father Pan, When the earth breaks into blossom Richer from the dust of man,

Though the high gods smite and slay us, Though we come not whence we go, As the host of Menelaus Came there many years ago; Yet the selfsame wind shall bear us From the same departing place Out across the Gulf of Saros And the peaks of Samothrace: