* THE SEA SCOUTS *

While all alone I wandered

At even by the sea,

Where winds and water pondered

Of how they came to be;

Where kittiwakes were crying

And salty spindrift flying

Through daylight slowly dying

A Shape confronted me.

She faced the broad Atlantic —

That maid of stately mien,

Purer than foam, gigantic

As Amazonian Queen.

Her billowy robe, unknowing,

How wild the wind was blowing,

Showed not a throb or flowing,

Hung steady and serene.

It was no fellow being

For she stood ten feet high,

And seaward gazed, unseeing

The human passer-by;

But only billows roaming,

And wide-winged sea-fowl homing

Through crepuscule and gloaming

Beneath an ashen sky.

The spectre rose before me

Most woeful, wan and white

Upon that foreshore stormy

Between the day and night;

And such an apparition

In this unique position,

Despite her sad condition

Awoke my wild delight.

Then came three youthful creatures,

And them I bade with awe

Behold the mournful features

Of phantom on the shore.

They laughed and said she’ d drifted

To land with bosom rifted —

A figure-head uplifted

From wreck of “Margery Dawe.”

They dared, those sea-scout shavers

Who watched this lonely coast,

Assert in treble quavers

We stood before a post;

They treated as a fiction

My gratified conviction

That, in her pale affliction,

We’ d met a salt-sea ghost!

Thus hard-eyed youth advances

By shadowless, stark way

Our middle-aged romances

To slight and scorn and slay;

Our make-believe to tatter;

Our gallant dreams to scatter;

To flout our faiths and shatter

Our twilight in their day.