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Home  »  Rudyard Kipling’s Verse  »  The Derelict

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). Verse: 1885–1918. 1922.

The Derelict

1894

  • “And reports the derelict ‘Mary Pollock’ still at sea”
  • SHIPPING NEWS.

  • I WAS the staunchest of our fleet

    Till the sea rose beneath my feet

    Unheralded, in hatred past all measure.

    Into his pits he stamped my crew,

    Buffeted, blinded, bound and threw,

    Bidding me eyeless wait upon his pleasure.

    Man made me, and my will

    Is to my maker still,

    Whom now the currents con, the rollers steer—

    Lifting forlorn to spy

    Trailed smoke along the sky,

    Falling afraid lest any keel come near!

    Wrenched as the lips of thirst,

    Wried, dried, and split and burst,

    Bone-bleached my decks, wind-scoured to the graining;

    And, jarred at every roll,

    The gear that was my soul

    Answers the anguish of my beams’ complaining.

    For life that crammed me full,

    Gangs of the prying gull

    That shriek and scrabble on the riven hatches.

    For roar that dumbed the gale,

    My hawse-pipes’ guttering wail,

    Sobbing my heart out through the uncounted watches.

    Blind in the hot blue ring

    Through all my points I swing—

    Swing and return to shift the sun anew.

    Blind in my well-known sky

    I hear the stars go by,

    Mocking the prow that cannot hold one true.

    White on my wasted path

    Wave after wave in wrath

    Frets ’gainst his fellow, warring where to send me.

    Flung forward, heaved aside,

    Witless and dazed I bide

    The mercy of the comber that shall end me.

    North where the bergs careen,

    The spray of seas unseen

    Smokes round my head and freezes in the falling.

    South where the corals breed,

    The footless, floating weed

    Folds me and fouls me, strake on strake upcrawling.

    I that was clean to run

    My race against the sun—

    Strength on the deep—am bawd to all disaster;

    Whipped forth by night to meet

    My sister’s careless feet,

    And with a kiss betray her to my master.

    Man made me, and my will

    Is to my maker still—

    To him and his, our peoples at their pier:

    Lifting in hope to spy

    Trailed smoke along the sky,

    Falling afraid lest any keel come near!