C.D. Warner, et al., comp.
The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Joyce Kilmer (1886–1918)
Poems of the Great War: The White Ships and the Red
W
That never a wind may reach,
They float in sunless waters
Beside a sunless beach.
Their mighty masts and funnels
Are white as driven snow,
And with a pallid radiance
Their ghostly bulwarks glow.
That once with gold was gay,
Here is a Roman trireme
Whose hues outshone the day.
But Tyrian dyes have faded
And prows that once were bright
With rainbow stains wear only
Death’s livid, dreadful white.
That unforgotten day,
Among her pallid sisters
The grim Titanic lay.
And through the leagues above her
She looked, aghast, and said:
“What is this living ship that comes
Where every ship is dead?”
From ruined stern to prow;
What was this thing of terror
That broke their vigil now?
Down through the startled ocean
A mighty vessel came,
Not white, as all dead ships must be,
But red, like living flame!
Were swiftly, strangely dyed,
By the great scarlet stream that flowed
From out her wounded side.
And all her decks were scarlet
And all her shattered crew.
She sank among the white ghost ships
And stained them through and through.
“And who art thou?” she said;
“Why dost thou join our ghostly fleet
Arrayed in living red?
We are the ships of sorrow
Who spend the weary night,
Until the dawn of Judgment Day,
Obscure and still and white.”
“Though I sink through the sea
A ruined thing that was a ship
I sink not as did ye.
For ye met with your destiny
By storm or rock or fight,
So through the lagging centuries
Ye wear your robes of white.
Nor honest shot of foe,
Nor hidden reef has sent me
The way that I must go.
My wound that stains the waters,
My blood that is like flame,
Bear witness to a loathly deed,
A deed without a name.
I carried friendly men,
The children played about my decks,
The women sang—and then—
And then—the sun blushed scarlet
And Heaven hid its face,
The world that God created
Became a shameful place!
The blow that sent me here
Was aimed in Hell. My dying scream
Has reached Jehovah’s ear.
Not all the seven oceans
Shall wash away the stain;
Upon a brow that wears a crown
I am the brand of Cain.”
The fleet on Judgment Day,
The ghosts of ruined ships will rise
In sea and strait and bay.
Though they have lain for ages
Beneath the changeless flood,
They shall be white as silver.
But one—shall be like blood.