C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
The Wreck of the Hesperus
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)
I
That sailed the wintry sea;
And the skipper had taken his little daughter,
To bear him company.
Her cheeks like the dawn of day,
And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds
That ope in the month of May.
His pipe was in his mouth,
And he watched how the veering flaw did blow
The smoke now west, now south.
Had sailed to the Spanish Main,
“I pray thee, put into yonder port,
For I fear a hurricane.
And to-night no moon we see!”
The skipper he blew a whiff from his pipe,
And a scornful laugh laughed he.
A gale from the northeast,
The snow fell hissing in the brine,
And the billows frothed like yeast.
The vessel in its strength;
She shuddered and paused, like a frightened steed,
Then leaped her cable’s length.
And do not tremble so;
For I can weather the roughest gale
That ever wind did blow.”
Against the stinging blast;
He cut a rope from a broken spar,
And bound her to the mast.
O say, what may it be?”—
“’Tis a fog-bell on a rock-bound coast!”
And he steered for the open sea.
O say, what may it be?”—
“Some ship in distress, that cannot live
In such an angry sea!”
O say, what may it be?”
But the father answered never a word,—
A frozen corpse was he.
With his face turned to the skies,
The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow
On his fixed and glassy eyes.
That saved she might be;
And she thought of Christ, who stilled the wave
On the lake of Galilee.
Through the whistling sleet and snow,
Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept
Tow’rds the reef of Norman’s Woe.
A sound came from the land;
It was the sound of the trampling surf
On the rocks and the hard sea-sand.
She drifted a dreary wreck,
And a whooping billow swept the crew
Like icicles from her deck.
Looked soft as carded wool;
But the cruel rocks they gored her side
Like the horns of an angry bull.
With the masts went by the board;
Like a vessel of glass she stove and sank,—
Ho! ho! the breakers roared!
A fisherman stood aghast
To see the form of a maiden fair,
Lashed close to a drifting mast.
The salt tears in her eyes;
And he saw her hair, like the brown sea-weed,
On the billows fall and rise.
In the midnight and the snow!
Christ save us all from a death like this,
On the reef of Norman’s Woe!