Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). Verse: 1885–1918. 1922.
The Exiles Line
N
The restless soul to open sea aspires,
Where the Blue Peter flickers from the fore,
And the grimed stoker feeds the engine-fires.
And last year’s sea-met loves where Grindlay knows;
But still the wild wind wakes off Gardafui,
And hearts turn eastward with the P. and O’s.
Oh slothful mother of much idleness,
Whom neither rivals spur nor contracts speed!
Nay, bear us gently! Wherefore need we press?
On those white decks beneath the awning shade—
Birth, absence, longing, laughter, love and tears,
And death unmaking ere the land is made.
Whom the cool seas call through the open port,
So that the table lacks one place next morn,
And for one forenoon men forego their sport.
Sways, shifts, and flickers on the spar-deck’s snow,
And like a giant trampling in his chains,
The screw-blades gasp and thunder deep below;
Heaven stoops to sea, and sea to Heaven clings;
While, bent upon the ending of his toil,
The hot sun strides, regarding not these things:
Bore Smith of Asia eastward yesterday,
And Delhi Jones and Brown of Midnapore
To-morrow follow on the self-same way.
Flushed with long leave, or tanned with many a sun,
The Exiles’ Line brings out the exiles’ line
And ships them homeward when their work is done.
The flying keels fulfil the web of doom.
Sorrow or shouting—what is that to them?
Make out the cheque that pays for cabin room!
With wife and babe and caravan of kit,
Not all thy travels past shall lower one fare,
Not all thy tears abate one pound of it.
Honour and state, go sink it in the sea,
Till that great one upon the quarter deck,
Brow-bound with gold, shall give thee leave to be.
Off for all time, and mean it when we swear;
And then, and then we meet the Quartered Flag,
And, surely for the last time, pay the fare.
In three short months the world he never knew,
Stares with blind eyes upon the Quartered Flag
And sees no more than yellow, red and blue.
Waifs of the land and wastrels of the sea—
Come nearer home beneath the Quartered Flag
Than ever home shall come to such as we.
Dead friends and houses desert mark our ways,
Till sickness send us down to Prince’s Dock
To meet the changeless use of many days.
The chain-gangs of the East from sire to son,
The Exiles’ Line takes out the exiles’ line
And ships them homeward when their work is done.
So much and twice so much. We gird, but go.
For all the soul of our sad East is there,
Beneath the house-flag of the P. and O.