Chapter X: The Guns of the Fleet

_Throne them in triumph together. Thine is the crowning cry!
Thine the glory for ever in the nation born of thy womb!
Thine the Sword and the Shield, and the shout that Salamis heard,
Surging in Aeschylean splendour, earth-shaking acclaim!
Ocean-mother of England, thine is the throne of her fame.
Breaker of many fleets, O thine the victorious word,
Thine the Sun and the Freedom, the God and the wind-swept sky,
Thine the thunder and thine the lightning, thine the doom._

IN MEMORY OF A BRITISH AVIATOR

On those young brows that knew no fear
We lay the Roman athlete's crown,
The laurel of the charioteer,
The imperial garland of renown,
While those young eyes, beyond the sun,
See Drake, see Raleigh, smile "Well done."

Their desert seas that knew no shore
To-night with fleets like cities flare;
But, frailer even than theirs of yore,
His keel a new-found deep would dare:
They watch, with thrice-experienced eyes
What fleets shall follow through the skies.

They would not scoff, though man should set
To feebler wings a mightier task.
They know what wonders wait us yet.
Not all things in an hour they ask;
But in each noble failure see
The inevitable victory.

A thousand years have borne us far
From that dark isle the Saxon swayed,
And star whispers to trembling star
While Space and Time shrink back afraid,--
"Ten thousand thousand years remain
For man to dare our deep again."

Thou, too, shalt hear across that deep
Our thundering fleets of thought draw nigh,
Round which the suns and systems sweep
Like cloven foam from sky to sky,
Till Death himself at last restore
His captives to our eyes once more.

* * * * *

Feeble the wings, dauntless the soul!
Take thou the conqueror's laurel crown;
Take--for thy chariot grazed the goal--
The imperial garland of renown;
While those young eyes, beyond the sun,
See Drake, see Raleigh, smile "Well done."

THE WAGGON

Crimson and black on the sky, a waggon of clover
Slowly goes rumbling, over the white chalk road;
And I lie in the golden grass there, wondering why
So little a thing
As the jingle and ring of the harness,
The hot creak of leather,
The peace of the plodding,
Should suddenly, stabbingly, make it
Strange that men die.

Only, perhaps, in the same blue summer weather,
Hundreds of years ago, in this field where I lie,
Caedmon, the Saxon, was caught by the self-same thing:
The serf lying, black with the sun, on his beautiful wain-load,
The jingle and clink of the harness,
The hot creak of leather,
The peace of the plodding;
And wondered, O terribly wondered,
That men must die.

THE SACRED OAK

(_A Song of Britain_)

I

Voice of the summer stars that, long ago,
Sang thro' the old oak-forests of our isle,
Enchanted voice, pure as her falling snow,
Dark as her storms, bright as her sunniest smile,
Taliessin, voice of Britain, the fierce flow
Of fourteen hundred years has whelmed not thee!
Still art thou singing, lavrock of her morn,
Singing to heaven in that first golden glow,
Singing above her mountains and her sea!
Not older yet are grown
Thy four winds in their moan
For Urien. Still thy charlock blooms in the billowing corn.

II

Thy dew is bright upon this beechen spray!
Spring wakes thy harp! I hear--I see--again,
Thy wild steeds foaming thro' the crimson fray,
The raven on the white breast of thy slain,
The tumult of thy chariots, far away,
The weeping in the glens, the lustrous hair
Dishevelled over the stricken eagle's fall,
And in thy Druid groves, at fall of day
One gift that Britain gave her valorous there,
One gift of lordlier pride
Than aught--save to have died--
One spray of the sacred oak, they coveted most of all.

III

I watch thy nested brambles growing green:
O strange, across that misty waste of years,
To glimpse the shadowy thrush that thou hast seen,
To touch, across the ages, touch with tears
The ferns that hide thee with their fairy screen,
Or only hear them rustling in the dawn;
And--as a dreamer waking--in thy words,
For all the golden clouds that drowse between,
To feel the veil of centuries withdrawn,
To feel thy sun re-risen
Unbuild our shadowy prison
And hear on thy fresh boughs the carol of waking birds.

IV

O, happy voice, born in that far, clear time,
Over thy single harp thy simple strain
Attuned all life for Britain to the chime
Of viking oars and the sea's dark refrain,
And thine own beating heart, and the sublime
Measure to which the moons and stars revolve
Untroubled by the storms that, year by year,
In ever-swelling symphonies still climb
To embrace our growing world and to resolve
Discords unknown to thee,
In the infinite harmony
Which still transcends our strife and leaves us darkling here.

* * * * *

V

For, now, one sings of heaven and one of hell,
One soars with hope, one plunges to despair!
This, trembling, doubts if aught be ill or well;
And that cries, "Fair is foul and foul is fair;"
And this cries, "Forward, though I cannot tell
Whither, and all too surely all things die;"
And that sighs, "Rest, then, sleep and take thine ease."
One sings his country and one rings its knell,
One hymns mankind, one dwarfs them with the sky.
O, Britain, let thy soul
Once more command the whole,
Once more command the strings of the world-wide harmony.